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Foremanship 

THE STANDARD COURSE 

OF THE 

UNITED Y.M.C.A. SCHOOLS 




BOOK I 
THE FOREMAN AND HIS JOB 

BOOK II 
MATERIALS AND THEIR HANDLING 

BOOK III 
EQUIPMENT AND MACHINERY 

BOOK IV 
ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT 



Foremanship 



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Directing Editor 
Leon Pratt Alford < \ Cp 

General Editor 
William Jessup Sholar 



Authors of Texts 

Wallace Clark Joseph W. Roe 

Walter N. Polakov Harry Tipper 



Authors of Reading Assignments 

The Story of Industry Leon Pratt Alford 

Creative Spirit in Industry... R obert B. Wolf 

The Story of Raw Materials, 

Frank O. Clements 

Incentive and Initiative. ...Chas. P. Steinmetz 

The Story of Labor Saving Machinery, 

George F. Barber 

Cooperative Development of the 

Individual Charles R. Towson 

The Story of Management, 

Henry Wood Shelton 

Industrial Leadership Henry L. Gantt 

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"1 V 



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The Foreman 
And His Job 



Part I 

BY 

WALLACE CLARK 
Part II 

BY 

HARRY TIPPER 



BOOK I 



ASSOCIATION PRESS 

New York: 347 Madison Avenue 
1921 



Copyright, 1921, by 

The International Committee of 

Young Men's Christian Associations 

(Printed in the United States of America) 

All Rights Reserved 



JAN 1 9 1321 



g) CI. A 6 5 4 5 9 



PREFACE 

The work and duties of foremen in industrial 
plants have undergone sweeping changes during 
the past decade. While greater responsibilities 
for getting out the product have been placed upon 
them, they have been all too frequently left alone 
without training sufficient to meet the new condi- 
tions as effectively as could be wished. Foremen 
constitute by far the largest executive group in 
industry — the group that gets things done. For- 
merly, the foreman's job was many-sided. He 
had to look after the purchasing of materials and 
supplies, the repairing of machinery and equip- 
ment, the designing and making of special tools, 
the securing of manufacturing orders, the keeping 
of workmen's time, the setting of wage rates, and 
the hiring and firing of workers. These functions, 
in part or in whole, are still his in many small 
plants; but in large ones they have been trans- 
ferred to well-organized departments managed by 
trained men — sometimes schooled specialists. 

Modern industrial methods, however, make it 
necessary for a foreman to have fairly exact 
knowledge of many things not required even ten 
years ago. Among these new duties may be men- 
tioned the economic control of the process of 
manufacture, the profitable utilization of time, the 
efficient handling of equipment, the keeping of 
correct records, and the proper management of 
workers. 

To meet these new duties and to assume the 
responsibilities imposed by them, many foremen, 



vi The Foreman and His Job 

even in well-organized plants, need help and train- 
ing such as they have never received through their 
experiences in learning a trade and, later, in 
managing a factory section or department. In 
order to satisfy that need of the foreman for 
knowledge of sound production practice, the 
United Y. M. C. A. Schools planned the compre- 
hensive Foremanship Course embodied in these 
four textbooks and their accompanying Reading 
Assignments. The course does not profess to give 
an exhaustive treatment of the subjects discussed, 
but it does present the fundamentals of foreman- 
ship — the subjects in which the modern foreman 
must be thoroughly grounded — and thus provides 
the foreman with tested shop practice and 
methods which he may adapt to his own needs. 

The dual treatment of the subjects in the course, 
as well as their grouping into four books of four 
chapters each, is in keeping with a policy and 
method developed by the United Y. M. C. A. 
Schools as most serviceable in gaining and holding 
the interest of the reader. Each of the sixteen 
chapters is divided into two parts. The first part 
deals with the material and technical side of some 
problem — methods, stock, tools, machinery, or- 
ganization, management, and so forth. The 
second part discusses the human side of the prob- 
lems in industry — relations between the foreman 
and his men, between the employes and the man- 
agement, between the industry and the community, 
and other subjects having to do with human rela- 
tionships in industry. 



Preface vii 

In addition to the text material of the four 
books, eight Reading Assignments form part of 
the course; and a very important part, too, for, 
on the one hand, they present the historical side 
of industry and, on the other, they show the 
vitalizing spirit which has imbued industry in its 
evolution to the commanding position which it 
now occupies. 

The content of this course is authoritative and 
sound. The authors were selected, not only be- 
cause they are men of recognized ability as me- 
chanical and industrial engineers, but because they 
see all sides of the problems which confront in- 
dustry and the foreman as the "key" man in it. 
They understand human motives, and the spirit of 
service which is more and more actuating men to 
put their best effort into their work, whether that 
work be managing a plant employing 20,000 men 
or making the simplest part of a product in that 
plant. 

Four authors — Messrs. Wallace Clark, Walter 
N. Polakov, Joseph W. Roe, and Harry Tipper — 
each thoroughly acquainted with modern industry, 
have collaborated in writing the four textbooks. 
Who these men are and what they have done is 
presented in another place — the introductory 
booklet of the course; but this much may be said 
here: Mr. Clark wrote Part I of Book I; Mr. 
Roe is the author of Part I of Book II; the first 
part of Books III and IV was written by Mr. 
Polakov; while the major task of authorship was 



viii The Foreman and His Job 

undertaken by Mr. Tipper, who prepared Part II 
of all four books. 

The Reading Assignments were prepared by 
men whose names carry weight for ability and 
reputation in the great field of industry. They 
are Leon P. Alford, George F. Barber, Frank O. 
Clements, Henry L. Gantt, Henry W. Shelton, 
Charles P. Steinmetz, Charles R. Towson, and 
Robert B. Wolf. 

These authors, both of Texts and Reading As- 
signments, have contributed willingly and gladly 
to making the course interesting and instructive. 
Special credit is due Messrs. Alford, Barber, Tip- 
per, and Wolf for their advice and counsel in the 
many conferences which led to the planning of the 
content of the course, and for subsequent assist- 
ance in coordinating the work of the various 
authors. Mr. Alford, especially, as Directing 
Editor, has been unremitting in his contribution 
of time and knowledge, both in formulating the 
outline of the course and in reading the authors' 
manuscripts. 

This Foremanship Course is, therefore, the 
composite product of able men working together 
to serve industry by helping the foreman to under- 
stand how big his job is, and to equip himself to 
fill it so well that he will become, in the highest 
sense, a capable manager of men and an efficient 
supervisor of production. 

William Jessup Sholar, 

General Editor. 



A TALK WITH THE FOREMAN 

In taking up this study of foremanship, let it be 
understood that you are not expected to surrender 
any ideas which have been worked out in your 
own experience to the profit of your men and of 
the company. You will, however, most likely find 
in the course suggestions which will supplement 
your own experiences and make them even more 
profitable in securing production. 

It is to be hoped that you approach the course 
with a mind entirely open, for in that spirit only 
is it possible for a man to get the most good out 
of anything. The fact is, that while your own 
experiences are valuable and you necessarily rely 
upon them, the experiences of other foremen in 
other plants are equally valuable if you can get 
hold of them. That is exactly what this course 
brings to you — the composite experiences of many 
foremen and industrial engineers. It is, there- 
fore, worthy of your earnest study. It will also 
be well worth while for you to test, in your own 
work, the practices here set forth in so far as you 
can apply them. In that way only will you be able 
to derive the largest benefit from the course. 

Begin, then, by reading carefully the booklet 
called "Foremanship — A Key to the Course," 
which tells you in an interesting way how this 
course was built. Familiarize yourself, especially, 
with the chart outline of the course which you will 
find in that introductory booklet. There are two 
reasons for this close study of the contents of the 
entire course, namely: 



x The Foreman and His Job 

First, the whole subject of foremanship will be 
seen in its coordinate relationships. 

Second, you will thus quickly become familiar 
with this modern method of presenting text ma- 
terial. 

You will note that there are two collateral divi- 
sions shown in the chart outline. These are Part 
I : The Job, and Part II : The Foreman. You 
will realize that the course is treating, in Part 
I, of your job, or the technique of foremanship ; 
while Part II treats of the development of you, 
the man, in your relationship, as a foreman, with 
your fellowmen. This plan is carried through 
each of the sixteen chapters which make up the 
four books. 

Let me call your attention, also, to the series of 
Reading Assignments prepared by men who are, 
by experience, well equipped to write on the sub- 
jects treated by them. These give you, in an in- 
teresting way, additional information which you 
may not have time to secure through your own 
research or collateral reading. You will note that 
each Reading Assignment relates itself to Part I 
or Part II, respectively, of each book. There is, 
too, another feature of the course, as shown in 
the outline, which you should understand is of 
vital importance; namely, the Project — the solu- 
tion of which will enable you to apply the prin- 
ciples set forth in the textbooks and their accom- 
panying Reading Assignments. And, too, in 
working out a Project you will have an oppor- 
tunity to exercise your own initiative. 



A Talk with the Foreman xi 

Plan of Handling Material 

If you are a member of a Y. M. C. A. class in 
foremanship, you probably will receive the ma- 
terial of the course as follows: At the meeting 
when the class is organized, Book I will be given 
you. When the class meets for its first session, 
you should receive Project No. One. At the sec- 
ond class meeting, the first Reading Assignment 
will be passed out. At the third session, the sec- 
ond Reading Assignment will be placed in your 
hands. You will then have received a complete 
Study Unit — a Textbook, two Reading Assign- 
ments, and a Project. At this fourth class meet- 
ing there should be a discussion of Project No. 
One, and you should ask such questions as will 
clear up anything about it which you may not 
understand. Book II will be given to you at this 
session, and thereafter a Study Unit will be dis- 
tributed in the order already indicated. 

How to Study 

In approaching the study of each chapter let us 
remember that it is divided into two parts. Part 
I presents The Job, or the mechanics of foreman- 
ship ; while Part II considers The Foreman in rela- 
tion to his job, to his fellowmen, and to himself 
as a man whose powers need to be developed con- 
sistently and intelligently in order to achieve 
worthwhile success. These two parts of each 
chapter should be studied in the light of their vital 
relationship. They are closely interlocked, so 
that neither part taken by itself can give full value 



xii The Foreman and His Job 

to the student. This is an important point; for, 
if you miss any portion of either part, you will find 
yourself crippled in the next chapter. Do not 
slight a page nor a paragraph. 

Foremanship is not a subject to be "soaked up." 
It is not a dry, abstract body of knowledge, but 
an activity; and to master it presupposes activity 
in the student. You must work — work with earn- 
estness and concentration. "The sun never burns 
until its rays are focused." Focus your thought, 
therefore, on this course; for — 

// you put little into this study, you 
will get little out; if you put in much, the 
range of your possible benefit is limitless. 

Note carefully the headings so that you may 
know precisely what each chapter and section and 
paragraph teaches. Underline the sentences that 
seem to contain the meat of the paragraph. Go 
back every little while for review, not only to 
clinch your knowledge of the previous section, but 
also to make the present and future chapters 
easier. Get the notebook habit. Jot down any 
idea that strikes you as most vital; and carry the 
notebook in your pocket for reference when the 
text is not handy. 

Get All the Benefits 

When you complete a chapter — that is, after 
the class has discussed it — turn to the questions 
at the end of the chapter and answer them to 
yourself. If there are any that you cannot answer 
fully and clearly, go back to the text and find the 



A Talk with the Foreman xiii 

answer. Upon receiving a Reading Assignment, 
read it as soon as possible — read it twice. Com- 
pare its statements with what the textbook says 
and note the points of agreement or disagreement, 
if any. 

When a Project is given you, work it out while 
the whole book is fresh in mind. The Project is 
designed to crystallize some of the principal ideas 
of the book into a concrete situation for you to 
work out. It is a test of your grasp of the prac- 
tices and methods enunciated. You alone lose if 
you do not work out the Projects. 

Take part in the class or group discussions. Ask 
questions and do your full share when called upon 
by the instructor, or group leader, to give a state- 
ment of your opinion. You thus help yourself and 
the other members of the class. Pursue the course 
faithfully and get the benefit which is to be de- 
rived from the experiences of others. You must 
always be a learner; for "Instruction ends with 
the schoolroom, education ends only with life." 
Knowledge of a trade or profession is the tool 
with which we do our work; the skill that distin- 
guishes the master is acquired only by practice. 

This course should help you, not only to master 
your job as a foreman, but also to understand the 
laws of successful living, so that you will take 
your proper place in the social order and serve 
humanity efficiently. Thereby you will inevitably 
deserve and receive just reward and happiness. 

Arthur H. Myer, 

Director, Department of Commerce. 



CONTENTS 



SECTION PAGE 

Preface v 

A Talk with the Foreman ix 



CHAPTER 1 

PART I: THE JOB 

The Foreman's Place in Industry 

I. Importance of the Foreman 3 

II. Responsibilities of the Foreman 9 

III. Types of Foremen Who Fail 13 

IV. Types of Foremen Who Succeed 20 

PART II: THE FOREMAN 
The Foreman and Management 

I. The Foreman and the Workers 25 

II. The Foreman as Interpreter 31 

III. The Foreman as Subordinate 37 

IV. The Foreman as Instructor 43 

Ask Yourself These Questions and Answer Them.. 48 

CHAPTER 2 

PART I: THE JOB 

Basic Factors in Production 

I. Utilizing the Time of Labor 51 

II. Controlling the Cost of Production 64 

III. Maintaining the Quality of the Product 72 

PART II: THE FOREMAN 
The Foreman and Production 

I. The Foreman and the Operations 78 

II. The Foreman and the Operators 83 

III. The Foreman and the System 89 

IV. The Foreman and the Work 95 

Questions for You to Answer 100 



CHAPTER 3 

PART I: THE JOB 

Methods of Getting Production 

SECTION • PAGE 

I. Getting Things Done on Time 103 

II. Visualizing the Progress of Work 116 

III. Making Sure of Adequate Supplies 130 

PART II: THE FOREMAN 

The Foreman and Labor 

I. The Foreman and the Man 135 

II. The Foreman and the Conditions 140 

III. The Foreman and the Organization 145 

IV. The Foreman and the Product 151 

Questions for You to Answer 160 

CHAPTER 4 

PART I: THE JOB 

Departmental Relationships 

I. Service Organized for the Foreman 163 

II. Service by the Foreman for His Associates 175 

III. Service to the Management by the Foreman 181 

PART II: THE FOREMAN 

The Foreman and the Social Order 

I. The Foreman and the Community 188 

II. The Foreman and the Public 193 

III. The Foreman and the Town 198 

IV. The Foreman and the Government 203 

Questions for You to Answer 208 



Chapter 1 



Part I 
THE FOREMAN'S PLACE IN INDUSTRY 



Part II 
THE FOREMAN AND MANAGEMENT 



Part I: The Job 

THE FOREMAN'S PLACE IN INDUSTRY 

Section I 
Importance of the Foreman 

The Evolution of Foremanship. — "The main- 
tenance of our modern civilization is dependent 
absolutely upon the service it gets from the 
industrial and business system." It is not now 
necessary to support this statement, made by a 
famous engineer, H. L. Gantt, by referring to 
the effect of the partial paralysis of our transpor- 
tation facilities, of coal mining, or of the steel 
industry. We do not realize until we stop to 
think of it how much we are dependent on the 
daily service we get from industrial organizations 
of one kind or another. 

Until recently the administration of most 
American manufacturing plants has been in the 
hands of one or two men in each plant. These 
men, who were the owners or their representa- 
tives, made all the important decisions, but as 
they became more and more removed from the 
actual operation of the business, their administra- 
tion became less effective. During the Great War, 
the mistakes and delays in the production of war 
materials were due largely to the practice of re- 
ferring matters for decision to a central head- 
quarters where it was not possible to have all 
the facts available. Even before the armistice 



4 The Foreman and His Job 

the tide had begun to turn toward decentralization 
of control where decisions are made by men who 
know the facts because they are close to the job. 
This movement toward decentralization is spread- 
ing slowly throughout American industry and 
more and more responsibility is being placed on 
the foreman — the man who "knows what to do 
and how to do it" 

Forty or fifty years ago, when shops were small, 
the owner was usually the best workman and 
showed the others how to do a job. He told each 
one what to do, he bought material, and, when 
the work was finished, saw that it was shipped. 
He also saw to it that bills were sent out, and 
frequently collected the money himself. 

As shops grew larger it was impossible for 
the owner to look after all the important parts 
of his work, so he delegated some duties to others. 
To a Sales Department he delegated the task of 
finding out what goods were needed and when; to 
an Engineering Department the task of determin- 
ing what materials should be used, what machines 
or equipment were needed, and the processes 
through which the material should go; to a Pur- 
chasing Department the task of securing the ma- 
terial; to an Employment Department the task 
of securing the necessary workmen; to the fore- 
men the task of bringing together the workmen, 
material, machines, and processes and producing 
the goods; and finally, to the Sales Department 
the task of distributing the goods manufactured. 



Importance of the Foreman 5 

In the expansion of American industry this type 
of organization was developed as the owner was 
forced to delegate his duties, one by one. These 
different parts of the business are not always as 
clearly defined in small plants as in large ones. 
In such an organization the foreman is the prac- 
tical man. He is like the lens of a camera which 
focuses the rays of light from a whole landscape 
upon a small photographic plate. 

The foreman takes the knowledge of 
all the other parts of the industrial 
organization and focuses it on the work. 

The Foreman Combines the Production Fac- 
tors. — There are four production factors with 
which the foreman has to deal. These are 

The Workman, 

The Material, 

The Machine, 

The Process. 

It is the job of the foreman to combine these 
factors in proper and efficient relations so as to 
produce a finished article of commerce. In small 
plants, the foreman himself selects and hires the 
workmen; but in large plants, where organization 
is expanded for the purpose of greater efficiency, 
the foreman no longer hires the workmen. He 
does, however, determine what men are needed 
and makes requisition upon the Employment De- 
partment for them. In such plants each job has 
been standardized so that the qualifications neces- 
sary in the workmen are card indexed in the Em- 
ployment Department, which keeps in touch with 



6 The Foreman and His Job 

the sources of supply for men of the kind wanted 
and with the market price of labor. It carefully 
studies the applicants and decides as to their fit- 
ness for the work. This saves a great deal of 
the foreman's time, but he must still devote suffi- 
cient time to the training of these men to enable 
them to do their work properly. 

The only sure way to tell whether or 
not a man can do a job is to try him out 
on that job. 

The Engineering Department, or some one who 
has adequate knowledge, determines the material 
from which the goods shall be made. In doing 
this, in many plants exhaustive experiments must 
be made and chemists, metallurgists, and other 
experts must be consulted. When the specifica- 
tions are worked out, the Purchasing Department 
goes out into the market and buys the material. 
It must keep in close touch with continual changes 
in market conditions and in suppliers. Its task is 
made more difficult by the necessity for weighing 
the relative importance of date of delivery, of 
cost, and of quality. When the material is re- 
ceived it is kept by the storekeeper until the fore- 
man is ready to use it. 

The machine or equipment best suited to do 
the work is also determined by the Engineering 
Department, or some one familiar with the de- 
sign of modern machinery and with the machines 
on the market. The Purchasing Department buys 
the machine and delivers it to the foreman. 



Importance of the Foreman 7 

The Engineering Department, or a man who 
has technical knowledge and experience, works 
out the processes of manufacture — the method of 
applying the machine to the material in order to 
produce the finished article of commerce. This 
information is given to the foreman in the form 
of blue prints, written instructions, by word of 
mouth, or, frequently, it is common knowledge 
handed down from one workman to another. Into 
the development of these processes and the design 
of these machines have gone centuries of experi- 
ment and investigation in all the sciences. 

The Foreman Puts Theory into Practice. — A 
good foreman does not hesitate to use the theories 
or knowledge of other men; in fact, his success 
depends almost entirely upon his ability to make 
use of the knowledge of other men. He learns 
just as much as possible about materials and 
processes, but no one can know everything. His 
job is to get information wherever he can and 
make use of it. He exercises his ingenuity in 
making that knowledge practical. 

In establishing any scientific fact it is necessary 
to go through a great deal of experimenting. A 
wise foreman lets scientists do that experimenting 
and then takes the result of their work and ap- 
plies it to his particular task. He realizes that 
modern business is so complicated and its problems 
so varied that, in order to work out the best 
processes, build the best machines, or develop the 
best methods of getting work done, there must be 
specialists who devote their entire time and atten- 



8 The Foreman and His Job 

tion to that kind of work. It is natural that such 
men should know more about their specialty than 
the average man. If one of these specialists can- 
not tell a foreman just exactly how to accomplish 
the result he is after, that is no reason why his 
ideas should be discarded. Frequently it needs 
only the practical point of view of a foreman to 
make that idea work. All the scientific knowledge 
printed in books, shown on drawings, or embodied 
in machines and processes is useless until the fore- 
man makes use of it in bringing together the work- 
man, the material, the machine, and the process. 

The job of the foreman is 
to put theory into practice. 

The Foreman Holds the Key to Productive Ca- 
pacity. — There is a growing appreciation of the 
fact that the "value of an industrial plant is de- 
termined by its productive capacity" and not by 
the inventory value of the land, buildings, and 
equipment. The foreman holds the key to this 
productive capacity. Think of the strategic posi- 
tion occupied by the foremen of our grain ele- 
vators, the yardmasters of the railroads, and the 
foremen of flour mills. We are really dependent 
upon them for the bread we eat, since they stand 
between us and the wheat fields. 

The way in which the foreman handles his 
job has a profound effect on the public, but an 
even greater effect on the worker. His life and 
his future are in the hands of the foreman. The 
foreman is the point of contact between the work- 
men and the management. In the eyes of the 



Responsibilities of the Foreman 9 

workmen he is the management, and the success 
of the policies of the management depends largely 
upon their interpretation by the foreman. The 
management may have a broad and generous atti- 
tude toward employes, but it is absolutely nullified 
by a foreman who is close and selfish in his treat- 
ment of the men under his charge. 

The foreman must also present to his superior 
officers the attitude of the workmen toward the 
company. This is not a light responsibility, for 
the actions of his superior officers are largely in- 
fluenced by what he tells them. 

Section II 
Responsibilities of the Foreman 

The Foreman Must Get the Work Done. — It 
is the foreman's job to get work done. He 
may be the best workman and so be able to turn 
out more work and better work than any of his 
men. This is a great advantage, but that is not 
the kind of ability which determines the selection 
of a foreman. The only reason for putting him 
in control over other men is because of his greater 
ability to get work done. This does not mean 
the ability to drive employes to spectacular stunts, 
or to push one job through in record time at the 
expense of other equally important work. It 
means the ability to judge the comparative impor- 
tance of the various kinds of work assigned to 
him and to get the work done in the order of its 
importance. 



10 The Foreman and His Job 

To accomplish these results the foreman needs 
all the qualifications of a good executive. There 
may be men under him who have greater tech- 
nical knowledge than he has and greater mechan- 
ical skill, but he holds his position because of his 
greater ability to overcome difficulties and get 
things done. 

However, the foreman cannot have an abso- 
lutely free hand in getting work done, for he is 
limited by three elements, namely: Time, Cost, 
Quality. He must get the work done at the 
proper time, at a reasonable cost, and in accord- 
ance with a definite standard of quality. 

The Element of Time Is Gauged by the Work- 
man and the Machine. — The time when the work 
should be finished is usually determined by the 
superintendent and the Sales Department, after 
considering the needs of customers and the other 
work ahead in the plant. The foreman, who 
probably does only a part of the work on any 
article, cannot, of course, know how the work is 
progressing in other departments of the shop, so 
he makes no attempt to determine the proper 
sequence of the orders he has in mind, but de- 
pends entirely on instructions received from the 
superintendent. However, in order to get work 
done on time, the foreman must plan the handling 
of his orders carefully so as to make the best 
possible use of his workmen and his machines. 

The Element of Cost Is Regulated by Produc- 
tion Methods. — The cost of material is of course 
dependent upon market conditions and is looked 



Responsibilities of the Foreman 11 

after by the Purchasing Department. The cost 
of doing the work (applying labor to the material) 
is, however, almost entirely in the hands of the 
foreman and it is his aim to do the necessary work 
in as short a time as possible without wasting 
material. In order to do this he must know the 
best method, must keep his machines in such con- 
dition that they can turn out accurate work, must 
give his workmen full instructions as to how the 
work is to be done, and must see that it is done 
in accordance with those instructions. 

The Element of Quality Should Be Stand- 
ardized. — The Engineering Department, the Sales 
Department, and the superintendent usually agree 
on the standard of quality after considering the 
customer's wants and the probable cost. The Sales 
Department investigates market conditions and 
concludes that it is to the interest of the company 
to produce goods of a certain grade in order to 
meet the requirements of buyers. The Engineer- 
ing Department translates this into definite speci- 
fications, which the superintendent places in the 
hands of the inspectors. The foreman accepts 
this standard of quality and attempts to turn out 
work which will pass inspection. 

The Relative Importance of Time, Cost, and 
Quality. — The time when the work is to be com- 
pleted is frequently more important than the cost, 
and sometimes even more important than the 
quality. The judgment of the foreman must be 
used in determining the relative importance of 
these three limiting factors of time, cost, and 



12 The Foreman and His Job 

quality. No rule can be set down which will 
apply in all cases, so the foreman will decide 
each case on its merits after learning the facts; 
but he will be careful to get the superintendent's 
approval of his action if it is out of the ordinary. 

Complex Problems Confronting the Foreman. 
Industry is today very much more complicated 
than it was even a few years ago. It is not very 
many years since the output of nearly all plants 
was sold within a radius of one hundred miles of 
those plants. Today, however, the distribution 
of the product of some plants is limited only by 
the extent of railways and steamship lines. In 
this expansion and the attempt to satisfy the 
greater variety of needs, the complications both 
in manufacturing and distribution have increased. 
However, the mere complexity of business does 
not stagger the modern business man. 

The foreman's job, being such an important 
part of the business system, has also become more 
complex. Processes have become more compli- 
cated and at the same time the productive capacity 
has increased enormously. The foreman's job 
today is as different from what it was twenty-five 
years ago as an automobile is from a buggy. The 
mechanism of an automobile is very complex when 
compared with that of the buggy and it gets out 
of order much more frequently, but who would 
think of going back to the old u one hoss shay"? 
Nor would the foreman of the modern shop 
think of going back to the methods of the old- 
fashioned shop. 



Types of Foremen Who Fail 13 

The foreman is not bewildered by the size of 
his job nor its complexity; and in attempting to 
increase his knowledge of modern methods he 
will not expect to have the matter presented to 
him in as simple a way as it was usually done 
twenty-five years ago. Such a difficult problem 
cannot be made to read as easily as a magazine 
story. It demands concentration, an honest effort 
to grasp the matter as it is presented, and a desire 
to apply the principles set forth to one's daily 
work with intelligence and persistence. 



Section III 
Types of Foremen Who Fail 

The Self-important Foreman. — It would be 
very interesting to go over in your mind the fore- 
men you know and see what is each one's concep- 
tion of his job, and how he measures up to the 
idea that the foreman's job is to get work done 
along lines of modern production methods. Here 
are some types of inefficient foremen that you will 
recognize : 

There is the foreman who judges his importance 
by the number of people that work for him. The 
more men there are standing around waiting on 
him, the more important he feels. His whole idea 
seems to be to have people do things for him. 

There is the foreman who delegates work to 
his subordinates and then makes all the decisions 



14 The Foreman and His Job 

for them. The result is that the foreman carries 
on his shoulders the responsibility for everything 
in his shop. He is always complaining that his 
men will not take any responsibility. He does not 
realize that the best way to get them to shoulder 
responsibility is to place the full burden on them 
as soon as they are able to carry it. 

There is the foreman who is happiest when 
everyone in his department depends upon him for 
information or instructions. He would like to 
have the whole plant depend on him. He is usu- 
ally very capable, knows his job, and is always will- 
ing to tell men how they should do their work; 
but as soon as he is away for a few hours or a day 
there is a decided slump, for his men are so used 
to asking him how that they forget to think for 
themselves. They put all the responsibility on his 
shoulders because they know he likes to carry it, 
and since he insists on worrying there is no reason 
why they should. This type of foreman seldom 
realizes that it would be to his advantage to have 
instructions written down and looked after by one 
of his subordinates so that he would be free to 
use his knowledge and judgment only on particu- 
larly difficult problems. He does not know how 
much more he could accomplish in this way. He 
usually resents any help which is offered to him 
from outside his department, and when the man- 
agement insists on giving him any help or instruc- 
tions he takes it as a personal insult. These are 
all types of the self-important foreman. 



Types of Foremen Who Fail 15 

The Talkative Foreman. — There is the fore- 
man who would rather talk than do anything else. 
Sometimes he talks about things not connected with 
the shop, but usually he talks about business mat- 
ters. He talks to his men and to his clerks, going 
over a subject again and again. Every day he 
goes to the superintendent's office and talks to as 
many people there as will listen to him, and, at 
the foremen's meetings, if there are any, he always 
talks — whether he has anything to say or not. He 
is so busy talking that he has little time to get work 
done. 

The Foreman Who Wants to Do Everything 
Himself. — There is the foreman who knows how 
to do things and insists on doing everything him- 
self. He cannot even tell his men how. If a 
machine is to be set up for a job that is a little 
out of the ordinary, he must do it himself to be 
sure that it is right. If a machine is broken down, 
he must fix it. He seldom succeeds in getting 
much work out of his department. 

Not long ago a superintendent was describing 
his experience with a foreman of this kind. His 
foreman was always so busy repairing a machine, 
setting up for a job, or even running a machine, 
that he had no time to run the department as a 
whole and plan his work so as to make good use 
of his machines and men. 

The superintendent tried every way he could 
to get that foreman to realize what his real job 
was, but he could not make any impression on 
him. Finally, he went down one day and told the 



16 The Foreman and His Job 

foreman that his department was not being run 
the way he wanted it run; that orders were not 
coming through and the work of other depart- 
ments was being held up ; that when he came into 
the department he found him, the foreman, lying 
on the floor under a machine and he could seldom 
get any accurate information as to how a job was 
going. Therefore, he had made up his mind that 
a week from the following Monday he was going 
to put in charge of that department a foreman 
who would run the department instead of a single 
machine — the kind of a man who could wear a 
white collar and keep his hands clean. Of course, 
that could be done only by letting his repair men 
and set-up men do all the necessary work on the 
machines. He wanted a man who could handle 
the department as a whole and get other men to 
do things for him. He told the foreman that that 
was the kind of a man he was going to put on 
the job, and added that he wished the present 
foreman would fill the position. 

A week later the superintendent came back and 
asked the man whether or not he had made up his 
mind to be that kind of a foreman. He was a 
little bit sore about it, but he decided he would 
take the job. The next Monday morning he 
appeared with a white collar and he kept both the 
collar and his hands clean all day. The super- 
intendent told him how glad he was to see that 
kind of a foreman in charge of the job and he 
never again had any trouble with him. 



Types of Foremen Who Fail 17 

The Toadying Foreman. — -There is the fore- 
man who always keeps his eye on his boss and, 
if there are two or three men higher up in the 
organization than he is, he is continually running 
to all of them telling them what he does and ask- 
ing them what they think about it. This type of 
man is more anxious to stand in with his bosses 
than he is to do his job right. 

There is another type of foreman who wants to 
stand in with his men. He thinks that the best 
way to promote good feeling is to let them do 
whatever they want; so, if there are several jobs 
ahead of a man he lets him pick out the easiest 
one to do next. This, of course, results in the hard 
jobs being put off from day to day and the sched- 
ules of the office are all shot to pieces. 

This man does not realize that it is his duty to 
be fair both to the workman and to the company, 
and that the Sales Department, which makes 
promises to customers, is usually the department 
which should decide the relative importance of 
jobs. 

There is the foreman who tries to advance him- 
self at the expense of everyone around him. By 
clever strategy and tale-bearing, and sometimes 
worse, he attempts to give the superintendent a 
wrong impression of the other foremen so that it 
will work to his own advantage. He also calls 
the superintendent's attention to all the fool mis- 
takes of his sub-foremen or his workmen, to show 
that he is the only one in his department who uses 
his head. He does not seem to realize that if 



18 The Foreman and His Job 

they do not know how to do their jobs it is a criti- 
cism of him for not teaching them. If this fore- 
man wants the job of a man above him or of some 
other man with more influence than he has, he 
carries on a campaign for the purpose of dis- 
crediting him in the minds of his superiors, in the 
hope that he may eventually step into his place. 

This type of man is always confidential, and 
when he is giving this alleged information he is 
continually looking over his shoulder to see 
whether anyone is listening. 

The Shortsighted Foreman. — There is the fore- 
man who is forever complaining of the shortage of 
good workmen and yet does not take any pains to 
make the best use of the good men he has or to 
train and develop more good workmen. 

There is the foreman who never openly re- 
fuses to follow instructions — he merely fails to do 
things until it is too late and then blames the 
"system" or anything else which comes to his 
mind. 

There is the foreman who is always willing to 
help some one else. In fact, he is so kind-hearted 
that he cannot refuse to do whatever anyone asks, 
even if it does interfere with his own job. 

There is another kind-hearted foreman who has 
a very hopeful disposition; he is sure that every- 
thing will come out all right and that there is no 
use worrying about anything. The result is that 
he has not the necessary force to see that his 
orders are executed. 



Types of Foremen Who Fail 19 

There is the foreman whose principal idea 
seems to be to get something for himself. When- 
ever he is asked to do anything, his first thought 
is, "What will I get out of it?" When he does 
render any service, he always puts a price on it 
and attempts to collect it before he delivers the 
goods. 

The Slave-Driver Foreman. — There is the 
foreman who thinks that the only way to accom- 
plish results is to drive his men hard. His voice 
can be heard above the noise of the machines and 
he would be perfectly happy if he had a long whip 
in his hands. This foreman does not realize that 
men cannot be driven to do what they do not 
know how to do; that when men are driven they 
either plunge ahead and do things wrong or turn 
against their driver. 

It is hard for this foreman to learn that his 
men must be thoroughly trained in the proper 
methods of doing their work and then given an 
incentive — something to make them eager to use 
those methods. 

There is the foreman who "raises Cain" when- 
ever the least little thing goes wrong. When 
other jobs are hard to get, his workmen swallow 
his abuse; but when business is good they leave. 
He goes out to the gate and hires a man to take 
the place of the workman who has left, and 
usually gets one who is less familiar with the work 
and, because of his more frequent mistakes, gives 
the foreman more reason to lose his temper. 



20 The Foreman and His Job 

There is the foreman who depends entirely on 
his muscle and his lung power. Every once in a 
while he threatens to knock a man down, and for 
several hours thereafter he is very proud of him- 
self. Fortunately this type is getting scarce — he 
is a relic of the dark ages. 

The "Pass-the-Buck" Foreman. — There is the 
foreman who is always defending himself. When 
his attention is called to a mistake he explains 
at length and proves conclusively that it was not 
his fault; he is always afraid that he will get the 
blame for the mistakes of some one else. He is 
so busy defending himself that he never has a 
chance to tackle his real job. 



Section IV 
Types of Foremen Who Succeed 

The All-Round Foreman. — No two foremen 
will do their work in exactly the same way, but 
the old-fashioned hit-or-miss way of doing things 
is being cast aside. It is not good enough for the 
modern foreman, who is reaching out for better 
methods of getting work done — methods which 
are just as effective and as up to date as the latest 
machine tool on the market. This man is making 
production his sole aim and he is driving toward 
that aim with a singleness of purpose which as- 
sures success. In organizations pervaded with the 
attitude of "every fellow for himself," where 
there is a diffusion of resources and energies, he is 



Types of Foremen Who Succeed 21 

making steady progress toward his goal ; and be- 
cause that is not a selfish aim but in line with the 
needs of the public as well as the company, his 
reward is bound to come and to be lasting. 

This up-to-date foreman assigns clear-cut jobs 
to all those under his control; he sees that the re- 
sponsibility of each individual is clearly under- 
stood, that is, that each one knows to whom he is 
responsible and the work for which he will be held 
accountable. He sees that there are no vague 
or divided responsibilities and that each one is 
given the authority necessary to match his respon- 
sibility. He has found lack of action and its at- 
tendant idleness greater hindrances to production 
than mistaken decisions, and that the elimination 
of idleness is more effective in increasing produc- 
tion than the speeding up of either men or ma- 
chines. He therefore concentrates his efforts on 
fixing responsibility and on getting those working 
with him to understand that "the authority to 
issue an order involves the responsibility of seeing 
that it is executed." 

There is the foreman who does not want his 
men to run to him with every little thing; so, when 
they come to him, he asks them what they would 
do if they were in his place. If their answers do 
not agree with his ideas, he tells them why. This, 
of course, encourages men to act on their own 
initiative and develops their judgment. 

There is the foreman who believes that all of 
his men have brains, and whenever he tells them 
how to do a job he tells them why it should be 



22 The Foreman and His Job 

done that way. He knows that he cannot be right 
there every minute, and that a number of little 
things will come up which the man can decide 
himself if he knows just what the foreman is aim- 
ing at. This develops judgment in all of his sub- 
ordinates. 

The "Square Deal" Foreman. — There is an- 
other type of good foreman who is very careful in 
the way he handles mistakes of any kind. When 
something has gone wrong, he thinks over the situ- 
ation carefully in an attempt to find out the reason 
for the mistake and to get some good out of it. 
He realizes that he can make a great improve- 
ment in his work by the way he handles mistakes. 
He finds out whether the man who made the mis- 
take has been given clear and complete instructions 
which he could be expected to understand. If not, 
he knows that it is not fair to blame that man. 
When he has determined the reason for the mis- 
take he decides whether it was due to carelessness, 
to wrong method, to mistaken judgment, or to 
some other cause. If due to carelessness or mis- 
taken judgment, he devotes more time to training 
that particular workman. He does not take the 
easy way out and designate some one else to check 
the workman up, but trains him to do it right. 

Whenever a mistake is made, this foreman calls 
it to the attention of the one who made it, but 
does not "rub it in." He is more interested in 
avoiding it in future than in scolding the man. 

There is the foreman who lays all the cards on 
the table in dealing with his men, with other fore- 



Types of Foremen Who Succeed 23 

men, or with his superintendent. He does not in- 
dulge in personalities, but takes it for granted that 
everyone else wants to decide the matter on a basis 
of fact instead of opinion. He does not complain 
to the superintendent about the shortcomings of 
another foreman until he has talked the matter 
over frankly with that foreman, and then, if they 
do not agree, he gets the other foreman to go with 
him to the superintendent for a decision. This 
man usually gets the decision in any argument be- 
cause he does not start anything until he is sure of 
his facts. His frankness then usually disarms 
anyone who is less frank. 

The Dependable Foreman. — There is the fore- 
man who gets things done when he says he will. 
It is not easy to get him to make a promise ex- 
cept when he has the material right in his shop; 
but when he does make a promise, the superin- 
tendent has learned that he can depend on it. 

There is a rare type of man who realizes that, 
when he is given authority over a department, he 
has to shoulder responsibility for the actions of 
all his subordinates. He is careful not to issue 
any orders that he does not expect carried out to 
the letter, but when he does issue an order he 
states it with the full expectation that it will be 
carried out and he usually mentions the time when 
it is to be done. When that time comes and the 
work is not done, he finds out the reason why. It 
is not very long before everyone around him finds 
out that he means what he says, even if he does 
not make very much noise about it. 



24 The Foreman and His Job 

The Open-Minded Foreman. — There is the 
foreman who gives careful consideration to all 
suggestions made by his workmen. If the sug- 
gestion is good, he adopts it; if not, he tells the 
person who made it why he is not adopting it. 
He does this promptly and frankly, even if some- 
times it is hard work, because he wishes his work- 
men to make suggestions since he knows that it 
will improve the work of the department and in- 
crease the interest of his men. 

The Foreman Who Truly Serves. — There is 
another foreman who believes that he is there to 
render service. He gives the superintendent the 
best service that his department can render, and 
gives his men all the help possible. His whole 
idea seems to be to give instead of to get; and, 
of course, the more help he gives other people the 
more he is able to give them and the more they 
give him. 

The responsibilities being placed upon the fore- 
man's shoulders are heavier than ever before, 
but there is a new type of foreman arising who is 
stronger and better able to shoulder the burden. 
More encouraging even than that is the fact that 
so many thousands who have been foremen for 
years are showing that they are able to carry this 
added load. These men are reaching out for 
knowledge, visiting plants where up-to-date 
methods are in use, going to night schools, and 
even taking courses in colleges to get more knowl- 
edge on technical subjects and business methods. 



Part II: The Foreman 

THE FOREMAN AND MANAGEMENT 

Section I 
The Foreman and the Workers 

Where You Stand as a Foreman. — When I 
was some years younger, several of us who were 
living together joined the militia. Out of the six 
of us, four remained privates and, of the other 
two, one became a corporal and the other a ser- 
geant. As you can imagine, the four who re- 
mained privates were constantly getting up jokes 
at the expense of the others, when we were out 
of uniform; also, we insisted that they were lucky, 
and just got these positions by chance, and that we 
didn't want to be more than privates anyhow. 

One evening, after drill was over and we sat 
smoking in our rooms, the man who had been 
made sergeant let go. He gave us a real lecture, 
which was sufficiently good to live in my memory 
today. It caught us by surprise, for he was a quiet 
chap, not much on conversation, but a very good 
leader. We liked him in and out of uniform and 
we did not suppose he had given any study to the 
things he spilled — until he spoke. 

"It's pretty tough, you fellows, to have a job 
of this kind," he said. "I'm supposed to know 
enough to see that you fellows know your duty. 
I'm supposed to be able to keep discipline among 
you. Yet you fellows know well enough I'm no 



26 The Foreman and His Job 

more intelligent than you are and I don't know so 
much more about military affairs. If I pretended 
to, you'd give me the horse-laugh. About all the 
discipline I'll ever be able to get in our company 
and my squad will be the discipline you privates 
will let me exercise, out of good will and a feeling 
that I'm square with you. 

"Now the captain is a little further away from 
you. You are pretty sure he knows a lot and you 
pay attention to what he says, but most of your 
orders come to you through me, and I've got to 
see that they are finally carried out. So I've got 
to play square with you and with my superior 
officers and I guess I can do that only by playing 
square with the army. Whatever is the right 
thing for the army is right for us, and we'll be 
square with each other on that basis." 

That is about where you stand as a foreman. 
Whether you are foreman of a gang of unskilled 
laborers on the railroad, or of skilled mechanics 
or of any other workers, you are far closer to them 
than the other supervisors. Most of the instruc- 
tions must come through you; a large part of the 
development of the workers must come through 
you, and you must see that the work is carried out 
in an orderly and efficient manner. You are not 
a military leader with power like that of the ser- 
geant I have mentioned; but you are a leader of 
your group of men and you are close enough to 
them to get willing service out of them if you go 
at it right. 



The Foreman and the Workers 27 

The Foreman Represents Skill and Authority. 
You are in a position to understand the worker's 
needs and the way in which he fits into his work 
and into his group. You are in a position to 
interpret the orders so that he can understand 
them. You can explain the rules, the necessity for 
accuracy, the reason for some of the red tape, and 
the object of the work. Yours is an important 
part of the chain of supervision. You are so close 
to the workers that you must needs deal fairly 
with them if you expect to retain discipline. And 
you are so necessary to the final work of "doing 
the job" in an orderly manner that your obliga- 
tion to the management is very vital and very 
definite. 

Your job demands the possession of certain 
definite skill in the work which the men in your 
group are doing. The main reason why you were 
made a foreman was because you had shown some 
greater skill in doing the work than the rest of the 
men. One reason why the men are likely to re- 
spect you is because they know "you know what 
you are talking about" ; but this is not enough. 
These are men whom you have been appointed 
to supervise and, as men, they give their respect 
to the man who is not only more skillful than they 
are but more on-the-square, more intelligent, and 
more capable. 

Your job of foremanship is a big one. To 
the group of men, you represent the company, the 
work, and the establishment. You represent 
authority in industry and a great part of their 



28 The Foreman and His Job 

feeling about these matters comes from what you 
say and do about them. Every man who is more 
skillful than his fellows exercises an influence over 
them and is able to swing their ideas as well as 
their admiration. In other words, every man who 
is called to supervise others because he is more 
skillful, more intelligent, or more tactful is edu- 
cating the men he has charge of every day. He 
is influencing them for the better — better work, 
better thought, better play — or for the worse in 
the same way. 

The Workers Considered as a Group. — A little 
later in this course we will consider the worker as 
a man, and his relations to others as an individual. 
Just now it is necessary to look at that group of 
workers which you are called upon to supervise. 

Physically, they differ amazingly. Some are 
short and slender, others heavy and tall, others 
medium. There are the dark and the light; the 
ones who show deep, lively eyes and the ones who 
seem to wake up slowly. They walk differently, 
they have different homes, their work is tackled 
in different ways. They do not have the same 
opinions. Some are important, some cool and 
keen, some will take advantage of anything, and 
some will refuse to get the better of anybody. 

They agree on many matters, but disagree on 
many others and in the way they see, or think 
about, things. They agree enough about their 
work to get along as a group, although they 
threaten to "bust up" the group if they get in- 
volved too deeply in personal differences. Think- 



The Foreman and the Workers 29 

ing them over, you will agree that they all have 
their good points and there are ways in which you 
like them. If anyone asked you whom you liked 
best you might be ready to mention Landers or 
Maginnes or Carter or Pitovski ; but just then you 
would remember Tony or Jim or some one else, 
and you would pause wondering whom you ap- 
proved of most. 

Now, these fellows assemble under your super- 
vision, and perhaps you think that you don't have 
anything to do with their personal agreements or 
differences. You know better than that. You are 
too close to the work and too close to its necessi- 
ties to imagine that any man can work as well if 
he is "mad" at another man, or thinks some one 
didn't treat him fairly, or faces any of those other 
human difficulties which stir up the mind. You 
know well that a man doesn't do his best work for 
a boss he isn't interested in and doesn't know any- 
thing about. So you are really concerned with 
this group of workers as men and consequently as 
individuals, because everything they think affects 
the kind and amount of work they do during the 
day when you are supervising them. 

Know What Your Men Think. — Probably 
there is no man in the whole establishment who 
has occasion to know, as well as you do, the way 
in which the "job" is affected by the thinking the 
workman does and the way he feels about things. 

Now the job of being a foreman is concerned 
with getting the best work out of the group of 
workers under the foreman's supervision, by guid- 



30 The Foreman and His Job 

ance, by care, and by keeping the group working 
together as a group. This means that the way in 
which every man in the group thinks about his 
work is something which concerns the foreman. 
He wants the men to think right about him and 
about each other; he wants them to think right 
about the company and the management, and he 
also wants them to think right about the work 
which they have to do. 

It is up to the foreman to know how to influence 
the thinking of his men. Doing this — keeping 
these men feeling and thinking right — means 
knowing them as individuals — the long and the 
short, the fiery and the calm, the grouch and the 
pleasant one. It means knowing how to make the 
long and the short men feel like twin brothers on 
the job, how to bring a smile to the grouch, and 
how to keep the redhead from getting "mad." 

Broad Knowledge Is Necessary. — Keeping the 
workmen feeling right about the company and 
the management means knowing enough about the 
company and its policy so that it can be explained 
clearly. All the red tape of inspection and rejec- 
tion of work, the stock room requirements, the 
intricacies of the time sheets and studies is 
charged up to the management unless it is ex- 
plained to the men and its usefulness is under- 
stood. All the apparent waste — and there is 
apparently a lot of it even in the best shop — will 
be counted as inefficiency unless the reason is 
understood and explained. Because the foreman 
is the first line of supervision, he is close enough 



The Foreman as Interpreter 31 

to the men to be able to deal with these matters 
and see that the group works harmoniously, thinks 
well of the company and the management, and 
puts its interest in the work. 

The men, however, must not only understand 
and feel right about each other, the company, and 
the management, but they must also know the use- 
fulness of their work and its importance, and feel 
right about that. Unless they are interested in 
their work, they will not do a good job at the best 
speed. They will allow their power to be idle 
and do only as much as is necessary to get through 
the day. Their work, its purpose, its necessity, 
and its value must be understood. The foreman 
is in the position where he can give them this in- 
formation and see that it is understood. The 
foreman is not supervising a job done by a group 
of workers; he is supervising a group of men or 
women gathered together to work at and accom- 
plish a job. The workers come first. The job 
grows out of the workers, and it is done well or 
ill according to their ideas and thoughts. The 
foreman who knows most is best capable of guid- 
ing and teaching his men. 

Section II 
The Foreman as Interpreter 

The Necessity for Interpreting. — When I was 
in the contracting business, years ago, most of 
the unskilled labor we used was Italian and, in a 
great many instances, the men could not speak 
English. It was necessary for us to have a man 



32 The Foreman and His Job 

with each group who could speak both English and 
Italian. Some of these men were able to speak 
the English language but brokenly, and the mis- 
understandings which arose as to the orders for 
the work, on various occasions, were very amusing 
and at times very disastrous. 

From time to time I have stood in court and 
watched the cases come up for consideration 
where the parties could not speak English, and 
have wondered how much of the value of the 
questions was lost in the passage of the message 
through the interpreter. Particularly, I have 
wondered how much of the warning of the judge 
was changed to threat, or of the kindly admoni- 
tion to peremptory order, because of the difficulty 
of transferring the personal application in the in- 
terpreting of the words. 

People who speak the same language can be as 
far away from understanding one another as 
though they spoke a different language. The real 
master of a science is the man who can develop the 
discoveries in scientific exactness and explain these 
matters so that children can understand them. 

Nearly always it is necessary to have some dis- 
cussion, some interpretation, in order that all the 
men in a group may understand a matter thor- 
oughly. Orders are easy to obey if you under- 
stand their reason. Systems, records, red tape of 
all kinds become useful binders, holding the parts 
of a business together, when the reasons for their 
use are known. Inspections, time studies, bonuses, 
and other matters of routine necessity are shown 



The Foreman as Interpreter 33 

to be valuable to the worker for his protection and 
benefit — as well as valuable to the company — 
when they are thoroughly understood. 

Interpreting, then, is quite an important part 
of the job of supervision. Telling the men about 
the things they have to do — their importance, their 
reason, and their purpose — is a great part of the 
matter. 

Understanding Must Precede Interpreting. — 
You cannot make a matter simple unless you 
understand it. In fact, it takes a much larger 
measure of understanding to put a thing into sim- 
ple terms than it does to repeat the terms used 
by those who are familiar with it. If you want 
to find this out thoroughly, try to explain to a nine- 
year-old boy the action of a machine or an engine, 
and see how far you can get without talking about 
pistons and cylinders and gears — words which are 
technical and not within the boy's comprehension. 

There are a lot of things connected with the 
system of any production or distribution job which 
are not a part of the necessary knowledge of the 
worker. They may know Form 101-A as the in- 
dividual job record, but why it is called that and 
what it does they have no idea. A little girl who 
knows there are cylinders in a motor car, and can 
point them out to you, may have no idea of what 
they do and why they are shaped as they are. 

It is up to the foreman to know why things are 
as they are and to understand them so well that 
he can tell about them in words that the workers 
will understand. But, if you want to interpret 



34 The Foreman and His Job 

something or make the other man understand it, 
you must know more than the thing you want to 
talk about. You must know whom you are talk- 
ing to, what they think, and how they speak. 

Not long ago I heard a man speak to a group 
of engineers on finance. He knew his subject and 
what he said was sound and well thought out; but 
the people were not interested. It was with diffi- 
culty that they kept their seats and suppressed 
their yawns. He knew what he was talking about, 
but he did not know the men he was addressing 
and how they thought and spoke. He did not 
speak within their understanding. 

It is a big part of the job of a foreman to know 
his men — to know what they think and how they 
speak. Only in this way can the matter in which 
he is interested be brought to their attention so 
that they will be interested and know the "reason 
why" of the thing. 

Make Your Interpretation Clear to the Work- 
man. — One day, recently, two of my younger 
children were arguing about something and, hear- 
ing the high-pitched voices saying " 'Tis so!" 
" 'Tis not!", I inquired about the matter under 
discussion. One of them immediately got me 
into the discussion by inquiring, "Daddy, doesn't 
it say 'My country 'tis of thee, Sweet lamb of 
liberty'?" Of course I corrected the youngster 
and then explained the song. He was incorrect 
because he did not understand what was meant. 
The words were just pleasant sounds to him and 



The Foreman as Interpreter 35 

he repeated the sounds without knowing whether 
they were right or wrong. 

Not very long ago I was in a factory where 
they make small machines. I stopped by the 
machine of an operator who was punching out a 
lot of small plates. After awhile I asked him 
what they were. He said, "P.X. 111." 

"You misunderstood my question," I replied. 
"What are they used for?" 

"Oh," he said, "I don't know anything about 
that." 

I suppose P.X. Ill was the job number of the 
work he was on, but he did not understand the 
purpose of the work and consequently he could 
not understand the value of the work he was 
doing. Somebody had failed to interpret the job 
to this man so, because of his ignorance, he took 
no interest in the article he was making. 

You may know the workers you are working 
with and supervising and you may know the things 
you are dealing with, but unless you see clearly 
and thoroughly all the matters connected with 
the job and can be sure that the men understand 
them, the fact that you know about them will 
not aid the men or keep their interest. 

Most of us know something about a lot of 
things, without knowing all about them. We know 
the system of doing things, but the reasons for do- 
ing them are not so clear. Many things, which we 
thought we understood, become very difficult to 
deal with when we are called upon to explain them 
to some one else; so we are a little inclined to let 



36 The Foreman and His Job 

the explanations go, or cut them short, or say 
that the company wants it done that way. It is 
not an easy matter to explain things so that an- 
other person can understand them thoroughly, 
anyway; and when the person is not familiar with 
the things by previous experience the matter of 
explanation becomes more difficult. 

Interest Is Aroused through Understanding. — 
Men are interested in things when they under- 
stand them; they lose their suspicions of many 
things when they get the reasons for them. If 
they do not understand the routine of the job 
sheet, the inspection, the time study, and other 
matters connected with the system, much of it 
will look foolish to them and will seem like an 
unnecessary irritation. Many grievances arise 
from small misunderstandings; and misunder- 
standings are always due to the lack of good inter- 
pretation and a good interpreter. No man is so 
hopeless that he cannot be made to understand 
the reasons for the practical things which are con- 
nected with his work, and no man is so unintelli- 
gent that he cannot become ambitious to do good 
work. There are a great many men who realize 
that they cannot become stars and acquire the 
speed and precision of the leaders; but they like 
to do a good job with speed and accuracy, and 
they will do it if they can be kept interested. 

You can see the same thing in sports. Many 
men who play tennis or baseball know they cannot 
become champions, so they are not fired with any 
increased ambition by the playing which is accom- 



The Foreman as Subordinate 37 

plished by the champions. They may look with 
admiration upon these heroes of sport, but they 
do not expect to follow their example and they 
don't try. They do want to play as well as the 
other fellows in their class and they hate to be no 
good at the game. Work, when you are interested 
in it, is like a game. Very few of us can be cham- 
pions and we know it, so we don't try very hard 
to become champions ; but we do want to hold our 
own among our fellows, at work as at play, and 
we will do it as long as we are interested in the 
matter. 

Our interest, however, depends very largely 
upon our knowledge and understanding of the 
work, the rules of the game, and the results. We 
want to know what we are doing, why we are do- 
ing it, and why we have so many rules to follow. 
Interpreting all these things to the group of work- 
ers under your supervision is a big, important part 
of the job of foreman; and seeing that they under- 
stand the interpretation is just as important. 

Section III 
The Foreman as Subordinate 

What Is a Subordinate? — When I first went 
to work in a shop as a youngster, I used to think 
about the long line of steps from sub-foreman, to 
foreman, shop foreman, general foreman, super- 
intendent, works manager, general manager, and 
so forth. That line looked like a very long 
stretch and the vision was somewhat discouraging. 



38 The Foreman and His Job 






As I looked into the matter further I discovered 
that each of these men was both an officer and 
a subordinate, taking his authority from some 
superior supervisor and delegating part of that 
authority to another subordinate who in turn acted 
as a supervisor. As I became acquainted with 
the workings of a factory, from my experiences I 
found out that all these supervisors had limita- 
tions to their authority and also obligations of 
service to some one else whom they represented. 
Even the president of the company was limited 
to certain things by the directors elected by the 
stockholders, and he was bound by his obligations 
to them, to the customers, and to the organization. 

A great many men are under the impression 
that the word "subordinate" means blind obedi- 
ence to somebody above us and a lack of freedom 
in judgment; but that is not the case. It means, 
roughly, throwing away your own desires in order 
that you may do your duty to the organization. 
It means nothing more than fulfilling your obli- 
gations whether they fit into your desires or not. 

The Men at the Top Are Subordinates. — I 
have a friend who is a director of two or three 
concerns and the president of two. His life is 
full of meetings. He is obliged to take a vacation 
at the end of a telephone. He must be away from 
his family night after night because of this or 
that business necessity. His obligations are so 
many that he cannot be sure of any free time. He 
is a subordinate; he must answer the demands of 
the different companies with which he is connected. 



The Foreman as Subordinate 39 

He must put aside his own affairs to meet com- 
mittees and to talk with labor leaders and work- 
ers ; he must consider his community. So, he must 
be continually subordinating himself to the obliga- 
tions for service which come out of his capacity 
and his responsibilities. He does not have one 
boss, and it is true that he does not have to stay 
in a certain place for a certain number of hours; 
but he has many bosses, and his hours are so un- 
certain that he is quite likely to lose his evenings, 
his Sundays, or his vacation. 

A subordinate is the man, who, recognizing the 
fact that he is obligated to carry out the policy 
of the organization, understands that policy and 
obeys it intelligently and with judgment, not 
blindly and ignorantly. The President of the 
United States is a subordinate, with so much work 
and so many obligations to so many people that 
he must be prepared to give twenty-four hours a 
day, if need be, to that service, intelligently and 
without question. He must use his judgment and 
intelligence, not to change, but to carry out the 
wishes of the government — that is, the people, 
as expressed by their constitution and their laws. 

If we substitute the factory for the government, 
the systems and methods of the factory for the 
constitution and the laws, the personnel of the 
factory organization for the government employes 
from the President down, then it will be clear 
that every supervisor is also a subordinate. He 
is a subordinate, subordinating himself to the 
policy of the plant, to its organization, to its 



40 The Foreman and His Job 

system, and to its methods in order to carry out his 
part of the work of putting these things into prac- 
tical effect, without respect to his own personal 
opinion about them. That means, of course, 
understanding the methods and the systems, 
understanding their reasons and why they exist, 
so that they can be applied intelligently and with 
judgment. This is particularly true of the factory 
supervisors and especially of the foreman, who is 
so close to the group of workers. 

Fair-Minded Subordinates Play with the Team. 
The subordinate is the man who cuts out indi- 
vidual play for the good of the team; who will 
make a sacrifice hit, if it is necessary, so that the 
team can score. He is the man who will obey 
the coach, not because he may always agree with 
the coach, but because the coach is charged with 
responsibility for the team; and every man on the 
team has to do his best to help him with that re- 
sponsibility. I have never been able to understand 
why we should look upon the subordinate position 
as an inferior part that a man plays. As a matter 
of fact, it is the greater part, because it requires 
more vision and intelligence to subordinate one's 
self for the good of the organization than it does 
to make the individual play. It is probably for 
that reason that the wise leaders of industry have 
said many times that only the good subordinate 
makes a good supervisor. No man who cannot 
subordinate himself for the good of the organiza- 
tion can expect to teach a group of men under him 
how to do that very thing. 



The Foreman as Subordinate 41 

The Foreman as an Officer. — The foreman 
as subordinate is the necessary preliminary to a 
good foreman as supervisor, and the foreman's 
place as supervisor is of great importance in the 
line of management. The close and intimate char- 
acter of his responsibility gives the foreman the 
opportunity to express the spirit and character of 
the organization to the men, and, at the same time, 
to secure from the men the cooperation and team 
work which result in the increased efficiency of the 
job. Like all jobs of management, the actual 
necessities involved in the supervision are only part 
of the work. The opportunities for developing 
the understanding existing between the men and 
the company, and among the men themselves, con- 
stitute a very important part of the job and a large 
part of the efficiency. In all the armies engaged in 
the late war, we paid a great deal of attention to 
the morale of the men, to their health, to their 
comfort, and to their team work. In industry, we 
have been inclined to emphasize the mechanical 
side of the matter — the process, the materials, 
the machine — and in the course of doing that, we 
have looked upon the man as a part of the ma- 
chinery, so that we have forgotten, to some extent, 
the effect of his thinking, his desires, and his atti- 
tude toward his work and upon the character of 
the work itself. 

The foreman is an officer in the sense in which 
that term is understood in the best military prac- 
tice; a comrade of his men, but a comrade of 
superior attainments and consequently a leader 



42 The Foreman and His Job 



who understands his men and knows when they 
need encouragement, and when they need a little 
discipline, and how much explanation will help in 
the accomplishment of the work. 

The order will be far better obeyed if the fore- 
man and the men understand each other and can 
believe that the order is worth while even if it is 
not explained to them. The work will be done 
still more quickly and more accurately, though, 
if the foreman and his group can go at it with a 
common understanding of its importance and its 
necessity. 

A good subordinate and a good officer come 
out of the same understanding of the job. There 
can be no team work unless the men believe in 
the coach, the manager, and the captain, and un- 
less they are willing to take on faith some of the 
work which they do. The coach, the manager, 
and the captain must be agreed as to their responsi- 
bility and take each other on faith where they do 
not understand the reason for the methods. Only 
in this way can they get the team spirit into every- 
body, so that the team will work coordinately — 
not like a mere machine, but like a machine might 
act if each part of it was endowed with intelligence 
and enthusiasm. With this kind of an officer, the 
group of workers will go at the job with a com- 
bined power that is far greater than the amount 
of power necessary merely to get by. They will 
do things with an ease that is astonishing and they 
will make the work of supervision a pleasure in- 
stead of an embarrassing task. 






The Foreman as Instructor 43 

Section IV 
The Foreman as Instructor 

The Old-Fashioned Foreman. — My friend 
John Smith was brought up in an old-time cabinet- 
making shop, where they had apprentices in the 
old way, and where nearly all the work was done 
by hand, except the turning. He is a designer of 
furniture today, and a very good one. He is fond 
of describing that old shop and of saying that he 
got all his education in furniture during his ap- 
prenticeship in it. Apparently he did not have 
the opportunity of getting much schooling. A 
little reading, a little writing, and some arithmetic, 
plus some geography and history, were about all 
he received. All his knowledge of fine fitting, 
workmanship, finishing, and decorating was se- 
cured from his practical workdays in the cabinet 
maker's establishment. The most interesting part 
of his reminiscences is that portion which refers 
to the bespectacled old foreman, his skill, his kind- 
liness, and his patience. 

"That man knew his business," my friend would 
say. "He could show any worker how to fit a finer 
concealed joint, how to carry through a decoration 
in each part of the piece. He knew how to use 
tools better than anyone else. Moreover, he was 
so interested in doing a good job that he not only 
showed you how to do it, but he made you feel 
proud of every step you made in advance. I be- 
lieve I owe most of my skill, and my mental de- 
velopment as well, to that foreman. He not only 
taught me the furniture business, but he taught 



44 The Foreman and His Job 

me to do a good job, to respect a real job, and 
to put all my brains and my skill into everything 
I did. Nearly every man who came out of the 
old cabinet-maker's shop is in some important 
position in the furniture business today. That 
old foreman did a good job of educating and in- 
structing all the boys and they loved him for it." 

Educating vs. Instructing. — It is well worth 
noting that my friend said "educating and instruct* 
ing." There is some difference between the two, 
although they ought to go together always. Edu- 
cation is making people think, while instruction is 
showing them how to put that thinking to useful 
purposes. 

That foreman was a great man. He did his 
bit in the world by turning a lot of young appren- 
tices into practical business men with a respect 
for their work, an honest love for their work, and 
a master capacity to see it through. 

The foreman is the natural instructor — to very 
many workers he is the only instructor. Many 
workmen have had little schooling and much of 
what they had did not stick. The foreman can 
make a good workman out of a bad one. He can 
create a love for a good job, an honest job, and 
an accurate job of work. To do this effectively 
he must continue the instruction work which was 
done by the old foreman in the days of general 
apprentices, and supplement it with modern ideas 
and methods. 

The necessity for the instruction of the work- 
man has increased because the work has become 



The Foreman as Instructor 45 

so highly specialized. My friend, who learned 
the business of making furniture in the old cabinet- 
maker's shop, had a much better chance to get 
some education out of his work than the worker 
of today because he used all the tools in the place 
and made each part of an entire piece of furniture. 
Yet he would not have been able to take full 
charge of completing the job without the wise 
instruction of the foreman and his patient educa- 
tional influences, born of his pride in his craft, his 
trade, his job, and the accomplishment of good 
work. 

Methods of Instruction. — The workman who 
learned so much from the foreman of the cabinet- 
maker's shop interested me greatly by his stories 
on this subject. One evening, when we were talk- 
ing about production and manufacturing subjects, 
I asked him why he laid so much emphasis on the 
old foreman's instruction and what was the man's 
system of managing the matter which had influ- 
enced him so much. 

He smiled a little at my request for system as 
he replied to my question. "He didn't have any 
real system in his instruction," said he, "not a 
conscious system, although he formed the habit of 
going through things in much the same way. His 
shop was not organized the way we have it now. 
I imagine he could have helped and influenced a 
great many more young workers if he could have 
had the advantages of modern organization in 
his work. But he did have one principle without 



46 The Foreman and His Job 

which the system would not be worth much, but 
with which one is master of any system. 

"He often told us that no good work was ever 
secured if the man did not know why the things 
were done that way and appreciate the reasons. 
He always taught us why the stroke of a plane 
should be just so (my friend illustrated this with 
his hands, but, of course, I can't give you that 
part of it) , and showed us the advantages of it. 

"He explained why some joints were concealed 
and some were not. He went further and told 
us why some kinds of lumber were good for cer- 
tain furniture and others were not. He discussed 
the grain of the lumber and showed us how each 
had to be worked differently to get the best and 
most rapid results. Similarly, he told us the rea- 
sons for the routine of job records and sheets, 
time sheets, and other things which seem so much 
red tape to the young workers. I don't believe he 
ever gave me an order without showing me the 
reason for it. He was a true instructor." 

Merely Giving Orders Is Not Instruction. — 
There are many men who think of instruction in 
business as ordering others, but that is not instruc- 
tion. A great many orders are delivered without 
there being any instruction with them at all. Un- 
fortunately, many of the officers in the industrial 
army do not see the necessity for instruction. 
They think that orders are all the instruction any 
worker needs. 

You know better. You are sufficiently close to 
the workers to know how much can be accom- 



The Foreman as Instructor 47 

plished by teaching them how to keep the machines 
in good order, how to manage their work, how to 
rest themselves with a maximum of effect and a 
minimum of time. You know that many of the 
workers have been pitchforked into industry, or 
their particular job in industry, without any real 
preparation ; and you know how little they under- 
stand about the machines they operate and the 
work they do. 

Because you know these things and the workers 
know you, you are in a fine position to give them 
a better understanding of the machine they work 
at, of the tools they work with, and of the work 
they are doing. You can show them, bit by bit, 
many things about the machine or the tools which 
will be interesting and will awaken their thought. 

Part of the job of being a foreman is to instruct 
the man, not merely on the orders for the day or 
the job, not merely on the rules, but on the tools, 
the work, and the reasons for these things. A 
good workman remains the most important prod- 
uct of civilization. He is likely to be a good 
citizen, and a good supervisor when he takes that 
responsibility. The foreman is largely responsi- 
ble for the good workman in the group under 
him and, to the same extent, for the poor work- 
man. Instruction is necessary, however, if the 
poor workman is to advance, and this instruction 
will not only benefit the entire group, but also 
will increase the output of well-finished material. 



48 The Foreman and His Job 

Ask Yourself These Questions 
and Answer Them 

Don't be satisfied with merely THINKING 
you have the right answer; be certain about it. If 
you are not sure of your answer or the subject is 
hazy, turn back and read that part carefully. 

1. Name the subject of each chapter in this 
book. 

2. What are the four factors which the fore- 
man must combine in production? 

3. What is the first responsibility of the fore- 
man? 

4. What are some of the problems which the 
foreman must solve? 

5. Name three types of the inefficient foreman. 

6. Name some types of the successful foreman. 

7. What does the foreman represent? 

8. What is meant by "interpreting" ? 

9. What must you know in order to interpret or- 
ders and policies to the workmen? 

10. What is meant by "subordinate" ? 

11. In what sense is the foreman an officer? 

12. What is the foreman's job as educator? 

13. What is the difference between educating and 
instructing? 

14. What is the difference between giving orders 
and instructing? 



Chapter 2 



Part I 

BASIC FACTORS IN PRODUCTION 



Part II 
THE FOREMAN AND PRODUCTION 



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Part I: The Job 

BASIC FACTORS IN PRODUCTION 

Section I 
Utilizing the Time of Labor 

Time Is the Vital Factor. — Efficient utiliza- 
tion of time is the vital factor in industry. It is 
the factor which most deeply concerns the fore- 
man; and it also concerns the workman. If a 
man decides to improve himself intellectually, he 
must take time to study. If he wants to get more 
work done, he must cut down the time required 
for each operation. The one factor which is com- 
mon to every kind of work is time. If anything is 
needed by a consumer, it is needed at a definite 
time. A man needs coal when it is cold enough to 
have a fire and his present supply is used up. He 
needs food when he is hungry and a new suit when 
the old one wears out. 

Working back from the time the article is 
needed by the consumer, we arrive at the time 
it is needed by the distributor — taking into con- 
sideration the necessity of keeping a certain stock 
on hand at all times and possible delays in trans- 
portation. Working back from the time the ar- 
ticle is needed by the distributor, we fix the time 
when the article should be manufactured, the time 
when the various parts must be completed, when 
material must be received, and so on back to the 
securing of the raw material. 



52 The Foreman and His Job 

Time runs through every phase of industry like 
the string through rock candy. 

Since the foreman has such an important place 
in industry it is particularly necessary for him to 
keep his eyes on the clock and the calendar; and 
to judge his success by the amount accomplished 
within a given time. 

Where the Time of Labor Goes. — The time of 
all employes of a shop is spent in three different 
ways : 

A. In useful labor. 

B. In useless labor. 

C. In idleness. 

Useful Labor Uses Time Constructively. — It is 
evident that the income of any plant is the resuh 
only of useful labor. However, the time spent in 
useless labor and in idleness must be paid for; 
and, since the income is the result of useful labor, 
those who are engaged in it must earn pay for 
those engaged in useless labor and those who are 
idle. The result is that those who do useful work 
do not receive full pay for all they produce and are 
entitled to. If useless work and idleness are done 
away with, those who are doing useful work can 
be paid higher wages. 

It is the object of any farseeing management 
to reduce the expense of idleness as far as possible, 
and to pay those engaged in useful work accord- 
ing to the amount of work they do. The progress 
made toward this end depends almost entirely on 
the foreman's ability to run his shop properly. 
The methods of production presented in chapters 



Utilizing the Time of Labor 53 

2 and 3 were worked out for the purpose of en- 
abling the foreman to use the time of all the men 
in his shop on useful work. Many foremen have 
operated their departments by these methods and 
the results have been to their own advantage as 
well as to that of their workmen and employers. 

Forms of Useless Labor. — Time spent on work 
which is of no value falls into three classes : 

A. Making things not wanted. 

B. Spoiling work. 

C. Doing work in a longer way 
than is necessary. 

Making Things Not Wanted. — When there is 
a good deal of work to be done, we want to manu- 
facture first the goods which will be used first. 
In order to do this the foreman asks the super- 
intendent's office, when it issues an order, to tell 
him when this work is to be completed. From the 
dates given he can easily see which work is of 
most importance. 

However, there are constant fluctuations in 
markets and changes in demands of customers 
which make it necessary to alter the dates for 
completion of these orders. Notification of these 
changes does not always come through to the 
foreman promptly; so, in order to avoid the waste 
of time on work which need not be done immedi- 
ately, the foreman, on his "Order of Work' 7 sheet 
advises the superintendent's office each day as to 
what work he expects to do the following day. 
This report is given to the superintendent's office 



54 The Foreman and His Job 

in sufficient time for that office to check it up and 
advise the foreman of any changes before the 
work is actually begun. 

Order of Work Sheet. — On the left side of his 
Order of Work sheet (Figure 1, page 55) the 
foreman lists all the machines in his department, 
arranging them in groups. 

Opposite each machine he then writes down 
the order or orders he expects to run on that ma- 
chine the following day. If he expects to do more 
than one order on a machine, he lists them in the 
sequence in which he intends to do them. Oppo- 
site each order number he writes whatever in- 
formation is necessary to identify them, such as 
the part and the operation. If there is more than 
one piece on the order he shows the number of 
pieces called for. 

On this Order of Work sheet the foreman has 
shown what he expects to do with his machines 
the following day, but in making it out he is prob- 
ably confronted by a lack of specific information 
as to just which orders are of the greatest im- 
portance. He has, of course, taken advantage of 
whatever information the superintendent's office 
has given him on the orders as to the dates 
wanted; but he can never be quite sure that he is 
running his orders in the proper sequence. Ac- 
cordingly he makes out three copies of his Order 
of Work sheet — the first on white paper, the sec- 
ond on yellow, and the third on blue — and sends 
the white copy to the superintendent not later than 
three o'clock of the day before the work is to be 



Utilizing the Time of Labor 



55 




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56 The Foreman and His Job 

done. This gives the superintendent's office time 
to go over the report to see whether or not the 
orders are being run in accordance with their latest 
plans. If not, the superintendent's office tells the 
foreman what changes should be made, and he 
has time to make them before he begins work the 
next morning. In other words, the foreman writes 
down his understanding of the proper sequence 
of work and asks the superintendent to check him 
up. This makes it unnecessary to take work out 
of machines after it has been begun, and avoids 
criticism after the work has been completed. 

The blue copy of this Order of Work is given 
by the foreman to his man who supplies materials 
to the machines — frequently called the "move- 
man." From this sheet, the moveman gets his 
day's work; that is, he sees what orders are to be 
run on the various machines and he brings ma- 
terials to these machines before the previous 
orders have been finished. When he delivers the 
material for any job, he checks it off on his copy, 
and when he is not able to get the material, he 
writes the reason on the report. Before the end 
of the day he returns his copy to the foreman. 

In the meantime the foreman has given the 
yellow copy to his clerk, who assigns jobs to the 
workmen. The clerk uses it throughout the day 
in handing out jobs and checks on it the jobs as 
they are begun and completed; if not begun, 
he gives the reason why. At the end of the day, 
the clerk enters on his copy the information which 
the moveman has written on the blue copy and 



Utilizing the Time of Labor 57 

sends it to the superintendent, who can then see 
how the plan submitted the previous day has been 
lived up to. Where the plan was not followed 
he can see the reason why. In this way the super- 
intendent and the foreman are kept continually 
in touch with each other and in a manner which 
does not require very much time. If the foreman 
is not planning his work as the superintendent 
wishes, mistakes can be avoided instead of having 
to be corrected at considerable expense after the 
work is done. It is evident that the foreman can 
get more advice and help from his superintendent 
in this way than by handling matters through con- 
versation. 

Since a large part of the work of making out 
these Order of Work sheets is of a routine na- 
ture — simply requiring a knowledge of the shop 
and the work in it — the foreman can relieve him- 
self of much of the detail by choosing one of his 
best men to do this planning for him and submit 
it for his approval. He can also delegate much 
of his other work to a clerk who is familiar with 
the shop. 

The amount of necessary planning and record- 
ing depends on the size of the department. In 
some places the foreman needs no assistants and 
in others he needs half a dozen; but he should 
never be so occupied with detail work that he 
cannot look after his real job of getting work 
done. In this book the foreman is spoken of as 
doing everything, although he will undoubtedly 
delegate a part of the work to others. 



58 The Foreman and His Job 

Avoiding Spoiled Work. — The spoiling of work 
is usually due to the fact that the workman either 
does not know what is to be done, or how to do it. 
To avoid this waste the foreman gives each work- 
man specific instructions as to what he is to do, 
and he supplements these instructions with such 
information as may be needed to enable the man to 
do the work properly — how to do it. The fore- 
man, or his clerk, gives the instructions on produc- 
tion cards showing what is to be done. Informa- 
tion as to how the work should be done can be 
given in writing, on blue prints, or by men specially 
skilled as instructors. The most effective results 
can be obtained through skilled men who can act 
both as instructors and inspectors. Such men 
know the standard of quality established by the 
company. They, accordingly, inspect the work as 
it comes from the machines to see that its quality 
is equal to those standards. If the work does not 
come up to the standards, the inspectors are so 
familiar with the process that they can tell the 
operator what mistake he has made and can show 
him how to correct it. The more frequently the 
work in process is inspected and the nearer the 
inspector is to the operator, the less there will be 
of spoiled work. 

Doing Work a Longer Way Than Is Necessary. 
If certain work is being done in one hour when 
it is possible to do it in half an hour with equip- 
ment already on hand, but by a different method, 
then that half hour is just as much wasted as if 
the operator spent it in idleness. It is to the in- 



Utilizing the Time of Labor 59 

terest of everyone for the foreman to reduce this 
waste time by using his own knowledge and the 
knowledge of other people to devise the shortest 
and most effective methods of getting work done. 
In thus improving methods, the foreman can exer- 
cise his ingenuity to the utmost. It is fortunate 
that he has at his command such a vast fund of 
mechanical knowledge as we have in America to- 
day. His improvement in mechanical processes is 
limited only by his ability to accept and apply the 
knowledge of others. 

The Waste of Idleness. — The tremendous 
waste of productive power in this country through 
idleness is almost unbelievable. One of our great- 
est engineers, H. L. Gantt, after years of experi- 
ence in a variety of plants, said that the equipment 
of American shops is used only about fifty per cent 
of the time ; and, when it is used, only about one- 
half of the possible output is secured from it. 
In other words, the output of American shops is 
only about twenty-five per cent of what it might be. 

The greatest and most important savings which 
a foreman can make in his own department are 
through the reduction of idleness. There are two 
kinds of idleness : 

A. Idleness of machines 
or equipment. 

B. Idleness of men. 

Idleness of Machines or Equipment. — In his 
attempt to reduce the idleness of machines, a fore- 
man's first step is to find out the facts. Accord- 



60 The Foreman and His Job 

ingly, he has records kept of when machines start 
up and when they stop, with the reason for the 
stopping. From a pile of daily reports of this 
kind, it is difficult to get a clear idea of the use of 
his equipment, so he tabulates the facts on a 
"Machine Record Chart," which is illustrated in 
Chapter 3. When a group of machines, there- 
fore, are totaled and these group totals, in turn, 
are added up to get the total running time of the 
department as a whole, the foreman has a com- 
prehensive view of the use of his equipment 
which he could not get so well in any other way. 

Having convinced himself as to the amount of 
idleness in his department and having ascertained 
in each case the reason for the idleness, his job is 
to reduce it. When the reason for the stopping 
of the machine is understood, the responsibility 
can easily be fixed. If the fault is chargeable to 
the foreman or to any of his assistants, he will im- 
mediately take the steps necessary to avoid its re- 
currence. If the responsibility for the idleness 
rests on the shoulders of some one outside of the 
foreman's department, he will attempt to gain the 
cooperation of the responsible individual or else 
ask help from the superintendent. In taking such 
matters up with men outside of his department, 
the foreman should confine the discussion to spe- 
cific cases, rather than deal in generalities. In 
that way permanent good feeling is established. 

Idleness of Men. — Most men would rather 
work than stand around doing nothing. There 
are exceptions, of course, but that statement will 



Utilizing the Time of Labor 61 

be generally agreed to. In the case of machines, 
it is enough to record that they are running or not 
running, since the speed of the machine or the 
amount it turns out when running depends upon 
the man who is operating it. 

In the case of a man, however, the mere fact 
that he is working or not working is not sufficient; 
we must know the rate at which he works. Conse- 
quently, the foreman records the amount of work 
done by the man and compares it with what he 
believes could be done by a capable man on a good 
machine. The foreman gets his record of the 
amount of work done and the time taken to do it 
from the production card, and enters it on the 
"Man Record Card." It is necessary to have all 
this detailed information written down but it is 
difficult to get a complete idea of the work of a 
group of men from these cards. For that reason 
the foreman has these records presented on a 
"Man Record Chart," (Chapter 3). This chart 
shows the amount of work done, while the reason 
for idleness is also given where a full day's work 
is not recorded. Cumulative lines show how the 
work done compares with a full week's work. 

Removing Obstacles to Production. — From 
these charts the foreman is usually surprised to 
see that the failure of the operator to do work 
within the estimated time is more often his fault 
than that of the workman. He learns for the 
first time how much of the time of the operators 
is wasted because of the improper sharpening of 
tools, defects in material which should be caught 



62 The Foreman and His Job 

by the inspectors, the unsatisfactory condition of 
machines, and the lack of proper instruction on 
new jobs. These charts bring home to him very 
forcibly the reasons why he fails to make good on 
some of his promises to complete work at specified 
times. 

Where these reasons for the failure of an oper- 
ator to do a full day's work are beyond the fore- 
man's control, he takes the matter up with the 
individual who is responsible and attempts to 
prevent its recurrence. When these obstacles 
affect the wages paid the man, there are frequent 
complaints. 

Not long ago an operator came to his foreman, 
saying that when he came to work there he had 
accepted the average day rate on the understand- 
ing that the piece rates were generous, and that he 
could make twice as much as his day rate if he 
wanted to work hard enough on piece work. He 
had been able to do that when there was plenty 
of work and his machine was in good condition; 
but most of the time he had made only a little 
more than his day rate. When he finished one 
job he usually had to wait hours for the next. 
His machine was worn out and was frequently 
down for repairs. Because it could not be kept 
to close limits, a good deal of the work he did 
was not passed by the inspector ; so, when he had 
no work or his machine was down, he had to sweep 
the floor, clean other machines, or do nothing. 
He did not like that, and besides, it paid him only 



Utilizing the Time of Labor 63 

his day rate. As a result his pay envelope did not 
contain what he needed to live on. 

This is beyond doubt a common occurrence; 
but it can be avoided, to a great extent, when the 
foreman devotes sufficient time to removing the 
obstacles which prevent his men from doing a fair 
day's work. 

When a sufficient number of instructors and 
inspectors have been provided and the mainte- 
nance of tools and machines has been improved, 
the foreman begins to show the charts to his work- 
men — bringing one or two of them at a time into 
his office. It is surprising how quickly they grasp 
the idea of the charts and learn to read them. 
Even foreigners who cannot read English can 
understand, from the length of the lines, the com- 
parison between their ability and that of the other 
operators. Some of them may have complaints 
to make as to the accuracy of the records; but 
those inaccuracies are quickly straightened out by 
the foreman, who is as anxious as the men to have 
the records correct. 

The filling of new positions or of vacancies is 
made much easier by the Man Record Charts. 
Long production lines show that a man at least 
knows how to do his work right and has some 
initiative. From the men with long lines, after 
careful consideration of the other qualities needed, 
a sub-foreman is chosen. The lines of the various 
sub-foremen indicate their ability to get their 
groups of men to turn out work. When the fore- 
man needs an assistant or somebody to succeed 



64 The Foreman and His Job 

him when he is promoted, the man is selected 
from the best of the sub-foremen, as shown by 
comparing records. 

It is a great advantage to the foreman to fill all 
positions of importance by promoting men already 
in his employ; this increases the loyalty of the 
men in his shop, because they know that their work 
will be rewarded, and also because they see that 
the management of the shop is gradually being 
made up of men selected for their proved ability — 
men who know the work and can get things done 
on time. 

Section II 
Controlling the Cost of Production 

What Makes Up the Cost of Any Article? 
The ability of a foreman will be judged, at least to 
a certain extent, by the cost of doing the work 
given him. He will, therefore, want to know what 
his work actually costs. The cost of manufactur- 
ing an article is made up only of those expenses 
actually incurred in the production of that article. 
For instance, the cost of owning a building and 
the land on which it stands is part of the cost of 
goods manufactured in that building. But the cost 
of owning the vacant lot across the street, which 
is not used for anything, is not a part of the cost 
of manufacture, even if the land is owned by the 
manufacturing company. It is an investment to 
provide for future growth — a sinking fund paid 
out of profits, and not a part of the cost of the 



Controlling the Cost of Production 65 

goods produced. Only buildings and land that 
are used should be included in costs of manu- 
facturing. 

Similarly, the cost of an article must include the 
cost of owning and housing the machine on which 
it is manufactured; but it should not include the 
cost of owning a machine a few feet away, which 
has been idle and has not in any way influenced 
the manufacture of that article. 

Hozv Cost Is Made Up. — The cost of an article 
is made up of the following items : 

A. Cost of material. 

B. Cost of direct labor (wages of the operator 
of a machine and his helpers, if any) . 

C. Cost of owning or renting the shop and 
keeping it equipped and organized to turn 
out work (sometimes called overhead or 
burden). 

The first two items are easily understood and 
arrived at, for they are represented by money 
which is paid out for a definite amount of material 
and a specific job. The third item is made up of 
a variety of expenses and must be computed care- 
fully. It, in turn, is made up of four items : 

1. Plant cost. 

2. Department supervision cost. 

3. Machine cost. 

4. Power cost. 



66 The Foreman and His Job 

Plant Cost.— The cost of running a plant in- 
cludes : 

1. Owning or renting the building, distributed 
as follows : 

a. Interest on investment in land and 
building. 

b. Taxes on land and building. 

c. Insurance on building. 

d. Repairs to building. 

e. Depreciation of building, i. e., the gen- 
eral decrease in value of the building as 
it grows older. 

2. Insurance on contents of building, employ- 
er's liability, etc. 

3. Heat, light, and water. 

4. Supplies — such as waste, oil, lubricating 
fluid, etc. 

5. Equipment — such as trucks, containers, etc. 

6. Maintenance and service, covering the 
wages of cleaners and truckmen, cost of run- 
ning storerooms, repair departments, etc. 

7. Plant supervision, including salary of super- 
intendent or manager, and the expense of 
his office. 

When these expenses are calculated for a year 
and totaled, they are distributed to the various 
departments, usually on a basis of floor area. For 
instance : If the plant expense for a year amounts 
to $300,000, and there are ten departments of 
equal size, it would amount to $30,000 per de- 
partment. 



Controlling the Cost of Production 67 

Department Supervision Cost. — The cost of 
supervising a department is made up of the sal- 
aries of the foreman, sub-foremen, instructors, 
clerks, and so forth. This might possibly amount 
to $20,000. It is added to the department cost of 
$30,000, giving a total of $50,000. 

It is evident that material which is standing in 
a shop is not affected in any way by that shop. 
It is only when machines are applied to the ma- 
terial that any value is added to it. The plant 
and the department affect that material only 
through the machines. Therefore, the plant and 
departmental cost must be applied to the material 
or the job through the machines. Accordingly, 
that expense is distributed to the machines, either 
according to the floor space they occupy or their 
value. 

For instance, if that expense amounts to the 
$50,000 mentioned, and there are ten machines 
all of the same size or value, the annual expense 
would be $5,000 per machine. If there are ap- 
proximately 2,400 working hours in the year, the 
machine hourly expense rate would be $2.08. 

Machine Cost. — There is also the cost of own- 
ing a machine and keeping it ready for work. This 
cost is composed of: 

1. Interest on the money invested in the ma- 
chine. 

2. Depreciation of the machine, due to age and 
the progress in mechanical design which will 
make the machine out of date. 



68 The Foreman and His Job 

3. Repairs to keep the machine in condition to 
turn out good work. 

If this should cost, on the machine mentioned 
above, $480 per year, the cost per hour would be 
20 cents. Adding this to the $2.08, would give 
us a cost of $2.28 in order to keep this machine 
ready to run. 

Power Cost. — When the machine is started up, 
it is necessary to add the cost of power, and some- 
times a little wear on the machine. For example : 
The power may cost 50 cents per hour. Adding 
this to the $2.28 gives us a total cost of $2.78, 
when the machine is running. 

Total Shop Cost. — We thus find that the total 
shop cost of any article manufactured is made 
up of: 

A. Material. 

B. Direct labor. 

C. Expense of owning the shop and keeping it 
equipped and organized, which in turn is 
composed of : 

1. Plant cost. 

2. Department supervision cost. 

3. Machine cost. 

4. Power cost. 

Relation of Costs and Selling Prices. — There 
is, of course, a considerable difference between the 
total shop cost and the selling price of most articles 
of commerce. If the business is to be successful, 
the selling price must cover the following items: 



Controlling the Cost of Production 69 

1. Total shop cost. 

2. Expense of selling (including salaries, com- 
missions, and traveling expenses of sales- 
men, dealers' commissions, discounts, ex- 
pense of branch offices, warehouses, adver- 
tising, and so on). 

3. Administration expense (including salaries 
of the officers of the company and the ex- 
penses of the executive offices), 

4. Profit (out of which must be paid interest 
on borrowed money, purchases of new 
equipment, buildings, land, development of 
inventions or new markets, dividends to 
stockholders, and the cost of maintaining 
machines in idleness). 

The foreman will increase his value if he gets 
a broad view of the business as a whole, for the 
more he knows about the effect of his work on 
others the more intelligently he can do his own job. 

Machine Rates and Direct Labor. — In the aver- 
age shop the machine rate amounts to a great deal 
more than the hourly rate of the direct labor. So 
much expense has to be incurred to equip and 
organize the shop, and so many things are done 
for the operator in order to leave him free to 
run his machine, that the cost of this service to 
him is naturally greater than the amount paid him. 
It is not at all unusual for the machine hour rate 
to be more than ten times as large as the hourly 
wage rate of the operator of the machine. 

The Value of Cost Records. — The expense of 
getting accurate cost records is considerable, and 



70 The Foreman and His Job 

it is not justified unless the records are utilized. 
Their value to the treasurer of the company is to 
show him where the money has gone; but that is 
very small compared with their value to the super- 
intendent and to the foreman. So far as they are 
concerned, the principal reason for accumulating 
cost figures is that they may use them as a basis 
for reducing future costs. In order to make this 
use of them, the records must be in their hands 
very soon after the expense has been incurred. 

If the foreman works on an order for several 
days, he wants to know what his production is 
costing the first day or two, so that he can get it 
down, if possible, on the remainder of the order. 
He also wants to know the total cost of that order, 
so that he can do the work at a lower cost later 
on, when a similar order comes through. When 
a foreman makes prompt use of cost records, he 
realizes, more than he ever did before, that low 
wages do not mean low costs. On the contrary, 
he learns that low costs are more frequently the 
result of high wages. The greatest savings that 
the foreman can make are the result of the better 
handling of his own job by providing economical 
methods and equipment and by intelligently plan- 
ning the work of others. 

The Cost of Idleness. — In arriving at the cost 
of running a shop and figuring the machine rates, 
it will be seen that by far the greater part of the 
cost is incurred in keeping the machine ready to 
run, and that the added cost, when the power is 
turned on, is comparatively small. In the instance 



Controlling the Cost of Production 71 

quoted above, it cost $2.28 to keep the machine 
ready to run, and only 50 cents more to run it. 
The expense of $2.28 goes on whether the machine 
runs or not; and for every hour it stands idle the 
company must pay $2.28 for rent, supervision, 
and the like. This expense cannot, of course, be 
charged against the product of any other machine, 
for it had nothing to do with that product. 

Since the machines, equipment, or buildings 
which are standing idle do not affect the goods 
produced, the cost of that idleness must not be 
included in the cost of the goods produced. It 
can only be charged to "profit and loss." 

Idleness of machines is caused by the failure 
of the foreman and superintendent to keep ma- 
chines in repair and provide power, tools, ma- 
terial, and operators, or by the failure of the 
Sales Department to secure orders for work which 
can be done on those machines. It is obvious, 
therefore, that in fixing the price of goods pro- 
duced, if the profit is made sufficiently large to 
reimburse the company for its losses due to idle- 
ness, the public is made to pay for the inefficiency 
of the management. If much idleness is charged 
to the public, it will eventually react to the com- 
pany's disadvantage, because the public will buy 
from a competitor who charges less idleness to 
the consumer. 

By keeping the cost of goods produced as low 
as possible, and by eliminating idleness and wasted 
effort, the foremen of any plant have greater 



72 The Foreman and His Job 

power to influence the profits of a company than 
the men who purchase the material or who sell the 
product. 



Section III 
Maintaining the Quality of the Product 

Relation of Quality to Time and Cost. — In 
order to sell the product of a plant, it is necessary 
to have a definite standard of quality. This stand- 
ard, or grade, is determined after considering 
the needs of consumers and the probable cost of 
production. The foreman accepts this standard 
of quality, and his job is to turn out goods of that 
grade at a specified time and at a reasonable cost. 
Anyone can do work of a specified quality if he 
takes time enough to do it. It is not so easy when 
time and cost must be considered. 

What Influences Quality. — The quality of 
goods produced is largely affected by four 
things : 

1. Attitude of workers. 

2. Working conditions. 

3. Equipment and machines. 

4. Inspectors and instructors. 

Attitude of Workers Affects Quality of the 
Product. — The effect of carelessness on the quality 
of output is known to every foreman. To prevent 
this carelessness, the attention of workmen must 



Maintaining the Quality of the Product 73 

be directed to the quality required; and it must 
be made to their advantage to turn out goods 
which are up to that standard. The actions of 
ninety-nine out of one hundred men are determined 
by a more or less intelligent self-interest. In deal- 
ing with men, the wise foreman does not blind 
himself to that fact. Since he wants good work, 
he makes it to the financial advantage of the 
workmen to turn out good work. 

Working Conditions Affect Quality of the 
Product. — A workman is consciously or uncon- 
sciously influenced by the amount of light he 
gets on his work, the ventilation of the room, the 
chair he sits on, the convenient placing or arrange- 
ment of his machine or workbench, and the clean- 
ness of the walls and floors. In fact, his whole 
surroundings are reflected in the work he does. 
In a shop where things are kept in good order, 
and the routine of the department goes on quietly 
and methodically, the man can keep his mind on 
his work. He will make fewer mistakes, and do 
work of a better quality than in a shop where he 
is continually falling over things left on the floor, 
and is disturbed by frequent arguments and petty 
annoyances. 

Equipment and Machines Affect Quality. — The 
work done in any shop is affected to a consider- 
able extent by the condition of the machines 
on which it is done. In fact, a high quality of out- 
put cannot be maintained when poor equipment 
is used. There is a point in the life of any ma- 
chine where it is more economical to get rid of 



74 The Foreman and His Job 

it than to use it. The foreman of any shop, no 
matter how large or how small, will find it worth 
while to study the needs of his shop, to provide 
the best equipment consistent with economy, and 
to see to it that his equipment is properly main- 
tained and used to the best advantage. The more 
attention he gives to this subject, the better will 
be the quality of his output. 

Functions of Inspectors and Instructors. — In- 
spectors frequently understand that it is their duty 
merely to detect poor work. Better results can 
be obtained if they understand that their function 
is to help operators turn out good work. That 
gives them a positive and constructive object, in- 
stead of one which is negative. If the inspector 
is, at the same time, an instructor and can, not only 
tell the operator that his work is not up to stand- 
ard, but also show him where he made his mis- 
take and how to avoid that mistake in future, he 
becomes a much more useful person. In doing 
that, the inspector secures a degree of cooperation 
and a reduction in the waste of material and time 
which are not possible when he has no responsi- 
bility except that of inspecting worked material. 

Increasing the Productivity of Slow Men. 
The Man Record Charts, which are given in 
Chapter 3, show how much good work each man 
does in comparison with the foreman's estimate, 
which has been made after taking into considera- 
tion time, cost, and quality. The foreman knows 
that he is judged to a great extent by his ability 
so to run his department that his men can produce 



Maintaining the Quality of the Product 75 

a fair day's work and that it is to his advantage 
to help those who keep the average down. He 
realizes that the idler and the slow worker are 
more in need of help than the good worker. Ac- 
cordingly, the foreman shows these charts to his 
workmen with the idea of developing their am- 
bition and a spirit of rivalry among them. He 
soon learns, however, that the long production 
lines of the two or three men who are head and 
shoulders above the others seem to have little 
effect on the average workman, but that he is very 
strongly influenced by the lines of the men he con- 
siders his equals. He hates to be beaten by an 
equal and will do all he can to keep up with him. 

There are some workmen, however, who cannot 
measure up to the average and do not respond to 
the foreman's effort to stimulate their ambition. 
These are the men he studies most carefully. Even 
without records these men know whether they are 
better or worse than those around them, and they 
resent the introduction of methods which make 
this fact evident to the foreman and the other 
workmen. Those who have, in the past, tried to 
cover up their low production by attempting to 
stand in with the foreman and can no longer do 
so are opposed to these records and do all they 
can to undermine their usefulness. 

Experience has taught the foreman that men 
who feel their inferiority are very apt to do every- 
thing possible to distract the attention of others 
from that inferiority. This frequently shows it- 
self in flagrant breaches of shop discipline or in 



76 The Foreman and His Job 

creating discontent in the minds of others. In 
this way they secure an outlet for their energy 
and distract their own attention, at least, from 
their inferiority. 

When the foreman studies the records of these 
men who have short lines on the chart, he realizes 
that they are usually the backbone of strikes and 
discord in his department. Their consciousness 
of inferiority and their discontent are continually 
smoldering and are easily fanned into flame by 
some fancied grievance, some real injustice, or 
some capable agitator. The foreman who wants 
fewer labor troubles in future realizes that he 
must solve the problem of what to do with these 
men who are below the average — whose lines are 
short on the chart. Shall he drop them from his 
payroll and ask the Employment Department to 
hire others to fill their places? He knows that 
the available supply of good workmen in most 
cities, except in times of business depression, is in- 
adequate and that those hired will probably be 
just as poor as those discharged. If he spends an 
hour in the Employment Department watching the 
applicants, he will see that they are made up 
largely of men who have never learned to do any 
job well — men who have been discharged from 
other jobs because the quality of their work has 
been poor and their production low. 

Discharging the inferior workmen in his depart- 
ment will merely add to this mass of floating 
labor. The foreman who is looking into the 
future will not discharge these men; he will try 



Maintaining the Quality of the Product 11 

to train them to do at least one job well. The 
foreman tries these men out on various kinds ot 
work until some job is found on which they can 
do better work than on others. On that job a man 
is given special instruction, so that no matter how 
long it takes to bring him up to the average, there 
are always sufficient instructors to help him. If 
there is no work in his own department for which 
one of these men is fitted, the foreman asks an- 
other foreman if he will not try him out. 

This method of handling short-line men appeals 
to the foreman's sense of fair play. He is giving 
these men, for once in their lives, a real chance to 
make good. When these men, who formerly had 
short lines, get to the point where they are turn- 
ing out a full day's work, week after week, they 
have almost invariably forgotten their discontent, 
and some of them even show an awakening ambi- 
tion to work with the team. 



Part II: The Foreman 

THE FOREMAN AND PRODUCTION 

Section I 
The Foreman and the Operations 

The Worker as an Individual. — The individual 
worker is first of all a human being. That seems 
so obvious as to be almost unnecessary of mention; 
but we have not acted as though we thought so in 
industry — not always, anyway. The worker, be- 
ing a human being, reacts as an individual. He 
tires in a different way from the next man. He 
gets his speed up at a different rate. He gets sick 
from different causes and with varying degrees of 
frequency. He thinks differently, his home neces- 
sities vary, he chooses his friends for different rea- 
sons, and buys things in his individual way. He 
may view food as do all the other workers, but he 
wants to choose it differently and eat it at different 
times. He may wear clothes more or less like 
those his fellows wear, but after he has worn 
them a week they are different. Each individual 
worker is a complete individual in himself with 
his own reaction to the work, the place, and the 
problem. 

One man comes to me and says that he is very 
discouraged about his place, the floors hurt his 
feet, the work is not interesting, and he stands in 
a draft. Another says he likes the work but it 
affects his eyesight. Another enjoys the place but 



The Foreman and the Operations 79 

would like to change his work. Each man acts 
according to his nature as an individual. 

Men sometimes act together and manage to 
agree upon a limited number of things they can 
do in common and for a certain period, but they 
are not alike and their differences must be recog- 
nized as well as their common agreements. Every 
man demands recognition as an individual and he 
will become restless, discontented, and dissatisfied 
when he doesn't get it. 

The Foreman's Opportunity with the Individ- 
ual. — To treat every individual as he should be 
treated and, at the same time, arrange an organi- 
zation in which these individuals can work to- 
gether without too much confusion constitute the 
big problem of industrial organization today and 
for the next generation or two. The foreman 
has a far greater opportunity to do this than any 
of the other supervisors and managers. The 
number of men in his group is not large. It is an 
easy thing to get to know them. The worker and 
the foreman can talk more intimately than any 
others in that plant. Consequently, the foreman 
knows which man needs a lot of information to 
keep him happy, he knows the one who will take 
things on faith, he is acquainted with the joker 
and the grouch, the quiet and the talkative ones. 
He knows, moreover, whether these surface indi- 
cations show the real man or are only cloaks or 
shells put on to conceal the actual man during the 
working hour. He can act with each man accord- 
ingly. He can grant to each man in his group 



80 The Foreman and His Job 

that recognition as an individual which every 
human being wants and which every human being 
has a right to expect. 

We must find a way to recognize the individual 
without losing our capacity to work together to 
the same purpose. There is no man in the indus- 
trial organization as capable of aiding in the solu- 
tion of this big human problem of industrial 
growth as the foreman. The foreman, with his 
small group looking to him as a man of superior 
skill and capacity in their trade, and consulting 
him on many business and personal matters, can 
recognize the individual properly. He can see the 
need for individual treatment and consideration, 
and he knows the necessity of cooperative work. 

The Educative Value of Work. — We are in- 
clined to look at the work we undertake as com- 
prising merely the mechanical or physical opera- 
tions for which we are paid and the immediate 
mental demands which are concerned with that 
same work. It is not very often that we view 
work in its most important sense; that is, as the 
great educator and developer of men — the only 
educator for millions of workers. 

Every man's job occupies a large part of his 
waking time. It must be worked out day after 
day with its problems of one kind and another. 
From the time we leave school until the time we 
pass away, the working world claims a large part 
of every day's thought and a large part of every 
day's physical energy. Not only that, but the 



The Foreman and the Operations 81 

character of the work itself has its effect upon the 
habits of the man. 

The character of the surroundings, whether 
they are clean or dirty; the kind of work, whether 
it is pleasant or otherwise; the kind of product, 
whether it be something belonging to a live neces- 
sity or something cold and dead — all influence 
us. The mental outlook of the men who work 
in a factory where the windows are clouded with 
dirt and thick smoke is affected by these con- 
tinually disagreeable features. The men who 
work with products that are pleasant to deal with 
are affected favorably by those products. 

I suppose the coldest and deadest job must be 
making coins in a mint, because coins are of no 
value in themselves. They are good only for 
exchange and they are not used for any creative 
purpose, but simply passed around from hand to 
hand until they are worn thin by the handling and 
must go back to be remelted. 

It is not so much in these things that the effect 
of the work is important, but it is in the continuing 
mental stimulus that comes from the occupation. 
The intimacies of human association grow out 
of our occupation and the problems of our lives 
are all affected by the conditions of the occupation. 

A Man's Work Is His Life. — Because the work 
is bread and butter, home, family, safety, and all 
those things, everything connected with work is 
important to the whole family. Is it plentiful or 
scarce? Will the individual man like it sufficiently 
to stay at it? What effect will it have on his 



82 The Foreman and His Job 

health? The companions he secures because of 
his work, the possibility of advancement through 
his work — these are the interesting topics of con- 
versation in all families and among all groups of 
workers. 

Work is not merely the machine at which I am 
earning a living, or the typewriter which carries 
the woman beyond the rent day, or the pick and 
shovel with which another must do his bit. Work 
is the great educator for most men. It is at work 
that he learns to apply the little knowledge he re- 
members from school days and he begins to have 
some idea of its usefulness. Whether he knows 
it or not, the work which he is doing every day — 
because it is so important a part of his life — affects 
his habit of thinking and his habit of acting, edu- 
cating him by the force of its necessary demands 
upon him and his dependence upon it. 

Work, therefore, governs the most important 
associations in the worker's life. If the work is 
limited and monotonous, the man will have a 
tendency to view everything from a narrow stand- 
point. If nobody pays any attention to him and 
he is considered a part of the machine, he will 
begin to see life from that point of view. If 
he doesn't understand the work and no one helps 
him out, he will not be likely to understand the 
broader relations of his life. 

Work will teach him anyway — good or bad — 
so the good can be increased immeasurably if the 
jobs are interpreted to him, the meaning of the 
work shown to him, and he is taught the reason 



The Foreman and the Operators 83 

for organization and its value to him. Work is 
our teacher. Whether it turns us out better men 
depends largely upon the companions we have to 
meet in our work, the patience of those who teach 
us our work, and the sympathy and tact of the 
men who govern that work. Good management 
can make work a greater and more liberal edu- 
cation for all workers ; and the foreman is the man 
who has an enviable opportunity as well as author- 
ity so to regulate the work that the worker will 
get full educative values out of it. 

Section II 
The Foreman and the Operators 

Know the Worker Apart from His Job. — Al- 
though work is the greatest educational factor in 
the life of most men and intimately affects the 
whole viewpoint of each man regarding society, 
government, and his neighbors, the man rarely 
shows his whole desire or his whole nature at 
his work. To know him as a man it is necessary 
to know him outside of his operations in the 
shop, the factory or the yard. There are many 
things which may sting him internally that will 
not come out in his conversation until he has put 
a safe distance between himself and his work. 
There are many things he can do which his work 
has not given him an opportunity to try out. These 
things all affect his attitude toward his work. 

I am acquainted with a company which has spent 
a good many years trying to get the point of view 



84 The Foreman and His Job 

of the workers by giving them an opportunity to 
express themselves, in order to find out if the work 
can be made a pleasure as well as a source of living 
for them. There was in one of the shops a man 
of Polish birth, who was accounted a radical and 
rather a fair agitator. Several times he had been 
reported as the originator of trouble. He was 
spoken of as restless and discontented. The man 
in active charge of the workers' meetings decided 
to talk things over with him. It was a difficult 
job, for the man was suspicious to the last degree. 
He did not believe in the company and he had 
been given a bad name which he felt was unjust. 
He therefore had a grievance and was inclined 
to nurse it. 

Finally, the man who was in charge of the 
workers got pretty w r ell acquainted with this so- 
called radical and they talked together a great 
deal. A representative of the management visited 
the man's home and found out that he spent most 
of his evenings studying a correspondence school 
course in mechanical engineering. Sometimes he 
felt that he was getting along all right, but the 
difficulties of the lessons made him thoroughly 
discouraged. The trouble was that he did not 
have enough public school education as a founda- 
tion. He was of an active, restless turn of mind, 
impatient with obstacles and very desirous of 
progress. The difficulty of advancing in his 
studies had soured his disposition and induced him 
to become one of a body of radicals — restless 
people like himself. 



The Foreman and the Operators 85 

The representative of the management took it 
upon himself to act as this man's adviser. He 
found night schools in which he could receive in- 
struction. He took an interest in the man's prog- 
ress. Now, this former radical is a representative 
of the workers at the shop committee meetings. 
He is a believer in the company and he is going 
forward in skill and usefulness. It was not until 
the representative of the management got to the 
man outside of the shop and made a friend of him 
that he found out what the trouble was and how 
to solve it. 

A company in New York state found out that 
a good many accidents occurred to the workmen 
who had sickness in their families or some other 
domestic difficulty. They were thinking about 
their troubles at home and that was the cause of 
their inattention to work. 

These instances could be multiplied a great 
many times; and each case would show that the 
particular circumstances of the man's social life 
and matters connected with his home or his sur- 
roundings are more frequently responsible for 
restlessness and misunderstanding than the dislike 
for his work. 

We are constantly saying that lots of men are 
misplaced in their work. They are doing the 
kind of work which is not most agreeable to them 
because they happened to drift into it and have 
been unable to find a way out. But you are not 
going to find out what a man would like to do and 
what he might prove very capable of doing unless 



86 The Foreman and His Job 

you know the man apart from his work. The 
average man is not inclined to tell you about these 
things unless he is pretty sure that he will not be 
laughed at and that his confidence will be re- 
spected. So the man-part of the worker is always 
more important than the work-part, and it is a 
more difficult part to understand. Nevertheless, 
the man's skill as a worker and his value in his 
work are dependent upon his thinking and feeling 
as a man — his ambitions, his disposition, his home 
surroundings, and his economic circumstances. 
The foreman must know his workers as men, 
apart from their jobs. 

The Wonders of Mechanical Operations. — Not 
long ago, an engineer, who has traveled all over 
the world and delved into the mysteries of differ- 
ent industrial developments, said he hoped that 
some day a writer would arise who would be able 
to show us the romance of industry; that the way 
in which all these different processes were devel- 
oped in order to make a nail, or a shoe, or an 
automobile more quickly and for less money than 
they were made before would make material for 
a story more entrancing than the best novel 
written. 

To me, the factory has been at all times a 
wonderful place. Although I have worked for 
days at a time at machine operation, I have never 
been able to get over the sense of wonder at the 
mechanism which takes a piece of metal and per- 
forms a half dozen simultaneous operations on it, 



The Foreman and the Operators 87 

with an accuracy that is more than human and a 
speed that is surely uncanny. 

I have stopped many times in a textile factory 
just to see the mechanical fingers come down and 
pick up the thread ends and tie them together; 
and it has always interested me to stand beside 
a collating machine in a book bindery and watch 
its fingers pick out the groups of pages for the 
book and put them one on top of the other, accord- 
ing to their order, so that they could be put into 
the binding machines. 

Whenever I pass the New York Herald Build- 
ing, with its big glass windows permitting a full 
view of the press room, I am sure to find an inter- 
ested audience watching the paper entering the 
giant press at one end and coming out at the other 
a complete newspaper, printed, folded, and 
counted. These processes are wonderful; and 
they are wonderful because the thought and in- 
telligence and good workmanship of so many 
thousands of men have gone into building them 
efficiently. 

Sometimes the things we work with become so 
familiar that we forget that they are just the 
product of the brains and skillful workmanship 
of men, and that few things are useful until trans- 
formed by the intelligence and the skill which 
man can put upon them. 

We Are Heirs of the Skill of the Ages. — Your 
part of the process of making a useful article 
and making it more efficiently — no matter whether 
it be the better unloading of cars, the more skillful 



88 The Foreman and His Job 

handling of machine operations, the development 
of weaving, or the more accurate and careful 
attention to sewing — is part of a wonderful co- 
operative process of making useful things which 
has evolved out of the knowledge, the study, and 
the patient work of thousands of other workers 
who came before you. 

It is not enough to know the man who is work- 
ing in your group as a man ; you should also know 
the processes which are undertaken in the group 
over which you have supervision. They are part 
of the technical requirements of your job. They 
are a little more than that, however; they are a 
part of the human story of the industry which is 
being developed by scores of other workers oper- 
ating in just such cooperative groups and adding 
their wonderful bit to the amazing total of the 
story itself. 

, If the worker who is operating a machine could 
understand the intelligent study which was put 
upon the design by the engineers who, one after 
the other, evolved that design ; by the workers who 
made the machine and added their skill to its 
manufacture ; by the workers who used it and dis- 
covered where it was strong and where it was 
weak — they, themselves, aiding largely in its de- 
velopment by their own experience in handling it — 
would he not be interested? 

If the man who operates the machine under- 
stood all these things, the machine itself would be 
more interesting and the work which he is doing 
upon it would be more valuable in his eyes. Here 



The Foreman and the System 89 

are some things which you can do as foreman. Get 
each worker interested in the tools with which 
he has to work, and the kind of labor which went 
into their manufacture. Get him interested 
in the examination of the tool as he uses 
it, so that he adds his valuable suggestion for 
its development. You can stir him to a love for 
craftsmanship, a pride in his job, and an under- 
standing of its value, when well done, because 
every process in modern industry contains the story 
of patient study, careful development, and thor- 
ough workmanship by thousands of men, the result 
of whose endeavors is placed at the service of the 
worker when he uses the tool for his own opera- 
tions. 

Every man in every industrial establishment is 
a debtor to the work of thousands of other men 
for his operative conveniences and tools; and his 
part in the process of developing new tools and 
implements makes other men debtors to him. 

Section III 
The Foreman and the System 

Obligations of the Group. — If Smith makes up 
his mind to build a little bungalow in the woods 
and to do the job himself, from the cutting of 
the lumber to the finishing of the proposition, he 
can work on his own time, begin when he feels 
like it, and quit when he is ready. Nobody will 
have any kick coming about the whole thing. But 
if Smith and Brown and Jones decide to build a 



90 The Foreman and His Job 

bungalow for their own common use they will 
have to work together. They will have to get 
together and decide which part of the work each 
will perform and they will have to stick to their 
respective parts of the work. They will be obliged 
to say when they will work so that the job will be 
kept going in proper order, and they will be 
obliged to agree when to quit work; otherwise, 
confusion and discord will arise. Brown, let us 
say, is doing the hauling and Smith is cutting the 
lumber. Brown decides that he feels like working 
this morning and goes around to haul the lumber, 
but Smith has decided to take a day off and no 
lumber is ready. Before very long, under those 
conditions, there will be a fight and no useful 
work will be accomplished. There will be no 
bungalow. 

So long as each man made every part of the 
product as an individual, he could do the work 
in his own home, could work when he felt like it, 
and get the job done when he was ready. That 
method was very slow, so slow that it was able 
to support only a very small population. There 
were no conveniences because they were so hard 
to make. Just as soon as men discovered that they 
could work faster and better and provide them- 
selves with more conveniences by dividing up the 
work, it became necessary to arrange this division 
so that there would be no confusion. 

Modern Industry Makes Group Work Neces- 
sary. — The progress of industry has brought us 
to the point where the very demands of our own 



The Foreman and the System 91 

conveniences make it necessary for us to work in 
groups, with a general system provided for that 
work, so that the work can continue in an orderly 
manner without confusion and without unnecessary 
expense and difficulty. The systems which we 
have in industry today were not planned from 
the beginning, on paper, for the theoretical deter- 
mination of the work. They developed gradually 
as industrial establishments grew large. They 
were found to be necessary to avoid the confusion 
that began to creep in when the larger establish- 
ment tried to operate along the lines that had been 
valuable for the smaller plant. 

The development of the group was absolutely 
necessary to modern industry. You and I could 
not enjoy any of the modern conveniences if we 
did not confine ourselves to a certain definite group 
of workers and depend upon the other groups to 
do the rest of the work. Of course, that means 
that we must work with the other groups if we are 
to have all the conveniences we should have and 
avoid extra cost and hardship. Just as soon as 
some of the groups quit work or do not work 
at the same time that we do, we get into the same 
difficulty which hampered Brown and Smith in 
building the bungalow. 

Your little group is just as important as my 
little group, because both of them are necessary 
to the building of our bungalow. You may think 
that my work is less difficult and more agreeable 
than yours, just as Smith might have argued that 
Brown had a cinch in comparison with him; and 



92 The Foreman and His Job 

I may be inclined to think that you have an unfair 
advantage of me ; but we must group ourselves in 
some way or other, and we must continue to oper- 
ate in these groups, otherwise we cannot keep the 
stream of necessities flowing to the places needing 
them — the home, the business, the community. 

Standardizing Group Work. — The develop- 
ment of the group specialization meant, of course, 
the development of group operation. The same 
necessity runs through the group operation that 
runs through the group organization. 

Suppose we go back to the bungalow which 
Smith, Brown, and Jones decided to build for 
themselves in cooperation— Smith was to do the 
cutting of the lumber and Brown the hauling, you 
remember. After these three fellows started 
work, Smith found out that Brown could 'haul 
twice as fast as he could cut, so he demanded 
another man to help do the cutting. Jones, who 
was shaping the lumber and fitting it, found that 
he could work only one-quarter as fast as Brown 
so he wanted three men to help him. Smith and 
his man then would be employed on group work, 
and Jones and his three *men would be on group 
work. Not all of the men in a group would be 
doing exactly the same kind of work, perhaps, but 
all would be doing work which fitted into a definite 
group of operations. Here is another example : 

In a chemical mill certain minerals are ground, 
pulverized, and packed in bags direct from the 
pulverizers. There are six distinct operations in 

the process of packing, viz. : opening the bag, fix- 



The Foreman and the System 93 

ing it on the mouth of the pulverizer, filling it, 
removing it, fastening it, labeling it. There is 
one man to each operation for each mill. These 
men are occupied in group work; for, although 
each is doing work different from the others, all 
are related so definitely to the packing of the 
product that they must be handled as a group. 

The foreman is the supervisor of group work 
and the group work is the essential feature of co- 
operation in the development of modern industry. 
All group work must be conducted by the group 
under the same system, the same regulations, and 
the same standards if it is to be worth while. The 
group would be just as slow and inefficient as the 
old method of individual work if it were not stand- 
ardized. It is the arrangement of the work with 
the same standards, the same systems, the same 
methods of recording, and the same valuation 
which makes the grouping practical and free from 
confusion. 

The unit piece of work turned out by the indi- 
vidual worker is dependent in value upon the 
group work. In packing the product in the chem- 
ical mill, for example, if the man who fills the 
bags does a good job, the other five men in the 
group must do an equally good job in their special 
operations in order that the completed job may 
be good. 

Benefits of Group Work. — So, first and last, 
the foreman must govern the standard of group 
work, both in quality and speed. The workers 
instinctively know this and the tendency is for 



94 The Foreman and His Job 

the most rapid workers to lower their pace to 
the group average. It requires less effort on the 
part of the workers, and even of the supervisor. 
It is a much harder job to bring the whole group 
up to the requirements of the more skillful than 
to let down on those requirements. Standardized 
group work calls for more patience, more study 
of the men, and more education on the part of the 
foreman. It is apt to be discouraging because of 
this, and so it is sometimes neglected. But, ade- 
quate production of the things we need depends 
upon the development and coordination of group 
work in industry. 

A group of men working together, in the com- 
panionship which comes with common working 
problems, can swing work through with a capacity 
that is impossible in the lone individual. They 
can develop a group spirit from the group work 
which will give them greater power for accom- 
plishment. To do this they must appreciate their 
dependence upon one another; make, use of the 
ways in which they can benefit each other; and 
rightly estimate the value of the work they are 
doing in the group to which they belong. 

If the best results are to be secured in produc- 
tion, with harmony and efficiency, the worker must 
understand that group work is the means of bring- 
ing those results to pass. He will then also under- 
stand that group work is the reason for group 
organization, and that group organization works 
for the benefit of the group as a whole and for 



The Foreman and the Work 95 

each individual in it. The foreman is the one man 
who can rightly organize and supervise the group. 
In doing that he serves, not only the group and its 
members, but also himself. 



Section IV 
The Foreman and the Work 

What the Job Means to the Foreman. — The 
job to the foreman means two things, viz : the job 
which the worker must perform under his super- 
vision, and the job of supervising the work. Very 
often we think of these as one and the same, but 
they are not the same by any means. The job 
which the worker performs is the physical side of 
the matter. It may be unloading cars, shipping 
products, turning shafting, weaving cloth, sewing 
garments, or a thousand other things in the won- 
derful process of useful manufacture. The job of 
supervising, however, means, among other things : 
understanding the workers, knowing how to keep 
them contented, interesting them in their work, in- 
structing them in their need for skill, interpreting 
to them the organization and its policy. 

Stated in that way, the job of supervising is 
quite an important matter, since it offers abundant 
room for study and plenty of room for the exer- 
cise of intelligence. Your group may be a large 
one and my group may be small; but, after all, 
industrial improvement depends quite a good deal 
upon how much understanding and intelligence you 



96 The Foreman and His Job 

and I put into the matter of knowing the group 
under our supervision and how much faith that 
group has in us — whether the group be large 
or small. 

Some years ago, a small advertising agency was 
run by one of the able men in that line of business. 
Compared with concerns of the same kind today, 
he ran a very small place. Not more than fifteen 
people were employed in his offices at one time, 
whereas three or four hundred are to be found in 
some of the present-day establishments. The 
other day, a group of advertising men were discus- 
sing this particular man and figuring out what had 
happened to his employes. They got a sheet of 
paper and wrote down their records. When they 
were through it was discovered that 90 per cent 
of those employes had made successes for them- 
selves in advertising, and most of them were heads 
of establishments much bigger than the one which 
trained them. 

Our Job Is as Big as We Make It. — It is a 
pretty big job to understand a small group of men 
and work with them so that they like to work in 
that group; so that they become skilled in their 
work and trustworthy in their discharge of re- 
sponsibility. It is the especial privilege of the 
foreman to be so close to his group of workers 
that he can influence them greatly, both for their 
own improvement and for the betterment of the 
work. This is the vital part of the job of fore- 
man. 



The Foreman and the Work 97 

One of my friends went through the Great War 
as a private. Not long ago he introduced me to 
the sergeant of his squad with great pride. He 
spoke of that sergeant afterwards in such a way 
that I became almost envious of the man who was 
so skilled in understanding and instructing his 
fellowmen that they would pay such a high trib- 
ute to his character. The general may have se- 
cured more fame, but I do not think that any gen- 
eral won as much affectionate respect as was 
shown to that sergeant by his men. It is this inti- 
mate and affectionate respect which can exist be- 
tween the foreman and his group, and it represents 
the great reward which can come to the super- 
visor who understands how to handle the human 
relations in his job; and the job itself is only as 
big as our ideas of it. 

The Bigness of Your Job. — So far we have been 
trying to see the relation between the foreman and 
the productive effort which finally accomplishes 
the useful work of industry. What does all this 
mean? It means that the foreman is the point 
of contact between the actual work and the plan- 
ning, the system, the factory management. The 
designing department can plan what is to be done 
and how, the factory management can arrange the 
tools and equipment, the officials can develop the 
system and the grouping — all these things must be 
done and continually done; but they are of no 
avail unless the work is smoothly carried out and 
supervised with good judgment and intelligence. 



98 The Foreman and His Job 

Make no mistake — the brains and intelligence 
of these other departments of management are 
part of the great work of keeping these useful 
industrial processes moving. They furnish the 
strategy, the definite plans, and the operations by 
which normal workers may have employment in 
the actual making of the product. They must not 
be belittled nor misunderstood. Their work is 
vital. Let us remember, also, that each group in 
industry depends upon all other groups. No one 
group can do the whole of the work required in 
the process of making useful products, and the 
groups which are under the supervision of the 
foremen are doing their part in the actual making 
of the product in its physical form. This means 
that the small size of the group under the fore- 
man's charge and the intimate cooperative char- 
acter of that work enable the foreman to exercise 
an influence inestimably important in the relation 
of the man to the job, the worker to the work, and 
the team to the team leader. 

The job of being a foreman has many difficul- 
ties, and no man can say that it does not require 
brain power, intelligence, and understanding. All 
these are necessary, but the good will and confi- 
dence of the men furnish the greatest satisfaction 
which can be secured from such work. No part 
of your job is unimportant. Every let down in 
efficiency, every grievance, every disturbance in- 
terrupts the work of production and compels so- 
ciety to pay more for your product with less money 
to pay with. Not only that, but the worker de- 



The Foreman and the Work 99 

pends upon the supervisor of his work to such 
a degree that foremen have in their hands the 
power to improve the condition of the worker 
more than any other single group of men. 

It Is Easier to Lead Than to Drive Men, — A 
man who has never had a strike in his plant, in 
thirty-five years of operation, said: "It is compara- 
tively easy to drive a horse with harness, blinders, 
and a whip. A little technical skill in holding the 
reins, some patience, and knowledge of the ani- 
mal's nature will make a good driver. It is a dif- 
ferent matter, however, to lead a horse without a 
bridle or harness or whip. The horse must know 
you and have some real regard for you before he 
will follow you. There are many thousands of 
men driving horses, but there are very few men 
leading horses, even with a halter. 

It is comparatively easy to drive a group of 
men, when they are afraid of losing their jobs and 
don't know where to get others. It is not so hard 
to keep men engaged in their work if you know 
when the work is well done or not well done, and 
if you know how to establish such a confidence 
and respect that they will work for you with all 
their interest, their might, and their intelligence. 

A foreman may be a foreman if he knows the 
work and does not entirely neglect the worker; 
but he can be a leader of his group, getting their 
full cooperation, if he understands the men, is 
patient with them, and develops their faith in his 
squareness and sincerity. That, after all, is the 
great job of being a foreman. 



100 The Foreman and His Job 

Questions for You to Answer 

1. State the three ways in which time is spent. 

2. What are the forms of useless labor? 

3. Describe an Order of Work sheet. 

4. In what two ways can the foreman reduce 
idleness? 

5. How is the cost of an article made up? 

6. What items must be included in the cost of 
running a plant? 

7. What items must be included in the selling 
price of an article? 

8. What are the causes of idleness of ma- 
chinery? 

9. What four things influence quality of 
product? 

10. Name the educative values of work. 

11. Why should you know your workmen apart 
from their work? 

12. Why is group work necessary? 

13. Name some benefits derived from group 
work. 

14. What are some of the opportunities given 
to a foreman who rightly manages his job? 

15. What is your judgment as to leading or driv- 
ing the men who work in your group? 



Chapter 3 



Part I 
METHODS OF GETTING PRODUCTION 



Part II 
THE FOREMAN AND LABOR 



Part I : The Job 

METHODS OF GETTING PRODUCTION 

Section I 

Getting Things Done on Time 

How One Foreman Woke Up. — As he closed 
the door behind him, Frank Skinner gave a sigh 
of relief and said to himself, "It's too bad, but 
it had to be done." Three strides took him from 
the door to the window and he stood there look- 
ing out. Skinner was the foreman of a good 
sized department and this was his office — at least 
he called it his office although his men referred 
to it as "the cage" because it was only a space 
seven feet wide by ten feet long surrounded by 
"chicken wire." 

Skinner had just fired Tim McQuade and was 
rather pleased with himself for not losing his 
temper; but as he looked out of the window he 
realized that, although he had stood for a bawling 
out without getting mad, he had done the thing 
he had no intention of doing — he had fired a good 
man. 

Tim McQuade was a good lathe hand and 
thoroughly used to the work, but of late he had 
been discontented and grouchy and the men 
around him seemed to be discontented too, largely 
due to his influence. 

As Skinner went to the other end of his shop 
this particular afternoon, hunting for some ma- 



104 The Foreman and His Job 

terial that could not be found, he had run across 
McQuade sitting on the window sill talking to two 
other men and smoking a cigarette. There was 
a strict rule against smoking in the shop, and he 
had given McQuade a piece of his mind. Mc- 
Quade had come back with such a jumble of com- 
plaints and sarcastic criticism that Skinner had 
fired him, knowing that if he listened three min- 
utes longer he would knock him down. 

For the next two days Skinner thought a good 
deal about Tim McQuade and sorted out his 
jumble of complaints into their logical order, 
which was somewhat as follows : 

Tim McQuade had been transferred from an- 
other department where he had been turning out 
work of a fairly simple nature; there had been 
little trouble with it and he had been able to make 
pretty good wages. Because he was considerably 
above the average man in ability, he had been 
transferred to this department and given much 
more difficult work. The piece rates were gen- 
erous and he would have been able to make much 
higher wages than in the other department if it 
had not been for the things which prevented him 
from doing a full day's work. He could not get 
his cutters sharpened properly or keep enough of 
them on hand; he had to spend a good deal of 
time going back and forth to the tool room. The 
foreman of the tool room of his own department 
had become so used to McQuade's complaints 
that little attention was given to them. Some 
weeks his jobs were so short that he spent almost 



Getting Things Done on Time 105 

half his time setting up his machine. He had often 
asked for a man to help him on set-ups but there 
was no one available. He spoiled some work 
because he had no gauges and a good deal more 
because his machine was so badly worn that it 
could not work to close limits. For the same rea- 
son he could not take off very much material at a 
time, and some jobs took much longer to do than 
they should. His machine was frequently down 
for repairs and the repair men were so tired of 
attempting to patch up a worn-out machine that 
they put every possible job ahead of it. Much 
of the work McQuade did was special and it took 
a good deal of time for the office to issue orders ; 
as a result he was frequently idle while he waited 
for the orders to come through or for material to 
arrive. 

When his machine was down for repairs or he 
was waiting for tools, orders, or material, he had 
to sweep the floor, count parts, or do nothing. He 
considered sweeping beneath his dignity and, 
when he was idle, he bothered the other men 
around him. When he was not operating his own 
lathe, he was, of course, paid only his day rate 
and, as a result, his weekly wages were too small 
for him to live on. McQuade had a wife, and 
three children he was trying to keep in school; 
rents were high, food was expensive, and clothes 
were almost prohibitive. He was discouraged with 
the struggle to make both ends meet and evidently 
sore at the foreman who made it impossible for 
him to make a decent living. He was not a well- 
educated man and could not place the responsi- 



106 The Foreman and His Job 

bility where it belonged — all he did was to blame 
his "boss" for everything. This particular day 
he had been waiting for three hours for something 
to do and, as he sat on the window sill talking to 
two other men, he had lit a cigarette ; just then the 
foreman had come along and given him a "call 
down," and he had lost his temper, spilled out all 
his grievances, and had been fired. 

Skinner turned over this matter in his mind and 
looked at it from several angles. Here was an 
operator who had not been kept busy and yet his 
department was falling farther and farther behind 
in the delivery of the particular kind of orders 
this man had been working on. The superin- 
tendent had also been telling Skinner that his 
costs on this kind of work were higher than they 
ought to be. He singled out the reasons why 
McQuade had not been kept busy. He recalled 
that on several occasions the material had not 
come through from the storeroom or some other 
department at the expected time; he had had a 
good deal of defective material which should have 
been discovered by the inspectors ; he had been idle 
when his machine was down for repairs and while 
he waited for orders. The more he thought about 
the matter the more he realized that a great part 
of the responsibility for McQuade's discontent 
was up to himself, the foreman. Did he have 
a shop which guaranteed fair play and equality 
of opportunity? A week ago he would have said 
"Yes," but McQuade's temper and the outcome 
had put a doubt in his mind. 



Getting Things Done on Time 107 

A few days later Skinner made up his mind 
that he would run his department so well and see 
that his men were so fairly treated that there 
would be no reason for the discontent which every 
now and then showed itself. There were many 
things with which he was not satisfied but which 
he had let go because they had always been done 
that way. Now he determined that he would 
get at the facts about his shop and not guess at 
things and that he would not be satisfied with 
anything but the best methods. He, therefore, 
developed methods of getting work done on time 
and to the satisfaction of his men and the manage- 
ment. Those methods are given in this book. 

The Chief Responsibilities of the Foreman. 
When a foreman takes charge of any part of a 
shop he accepts two chief responsibilities: 

1. To fill his orders as rapidly as possible and 
in the proper sequence. 

. 2. To operate, as far as possible, every ma- 
chine when there is work for it to do. 

By the word "machine*' is meant whatever 
equipment is used to do the work. Where there 
are no machines it is the foreman's responsibility 
to keep his men busy whenever there is work for 
them to do. It is not easy for the foreman to 
realize the importance of these two responsibili- 
ties; and, when he does realize their importance, 
he is confronted by the fact that frequently he is 
not given information about his orders with suffi- 



108 The Foreman and His Job 

cient exactness to enable him to get them out in the 
proper sequence. Moreover, in many plants there 
is no mechanism by which he can plan the work for 
his machines so that he may know with certainty, 
any day, whether or not the machines will be oper- 
ated the following day. 

The first step the foreman takes is to find out 
exactly how much of the time his machines are 
running. Of course he remembers what machines 
have been down during the last few days; but he 
cannot recall, in many cases, how long they were 
down or why. He needs accurate information 
presented to him so clearly that he can grasp the 
facts in regard to his department as a whole. 

Daily Idle Machine Report. — The foreman 
has one of his assistants walk through the depart- 
ment each morning, soon after the shop starts up, 
and note down on a Daily Idle Machine Report 
(see page 109) the numbers of the machines which 
are not running, with the time shown under the 
"reason why" they are stopped. Later in the day, 
when a machine starts up he shows the time in the 
column headed "Started," and when other ma- 
chines stop during the day he adds them to the list. 
This is a very simple record to keep; in fact, it is 
so simple that it does not help the foreman to 
visualize his shop, so he has the information trans- 
ferred to a chart. 



Getting Things Done on Time 



109 



Shift 








Date Cbt. t. /? 


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NO. 


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DAILY IDLE MACHINE REPORT ^£jLa*p£ei*_ Foreman 



Figure 2 



110 



The Foreman and His Job 



Machine Record Chart. — Since time is the most 
important consideration in running a shop, and is 
the one element common to all work, the foreman 
has a sheet ruled by hours of his working day or 
week. If he works an eight-hour day, he has each 
wide column, which represents a day, ruled off into 
four narrower columns, each representing two 
hours. If he works a nine-hour day, he rules the 
day off into four wide spaces of two hours each 
and one narrower space representing one hour. 




Figure 3 

This ruling is indicated in Figure 3, which is a 
section from the Machine Record Chart, Figure 
4, facing page 113. 

On the left side of this chart he lists all the 
machines in his department, arranging them in 
groups. At the top of each group he leaves a space 
for the total of that group. At the top of the 



Getting Things Done on Time 111 

sheet he leaves a space for the total of the de- 
partment. Opposite each machine number he in- 
dicates whether or not the machine has been run- 
ning by drawing a light line through the time dur- 
ing which the machine ran. A blank space indi- 
cates that the machine did not run, and in that 
space he places a letter or symbol to indicate the 
reason why. Under the light line he draws a 
heavy line to indicate the cumulative running time 
of the machine for the whole week. The length 
of this heavy line is always equal to the sum of the 
light lines for the various days. The running 
time of the individual machines in a group is 
averaged, and the light and heavy lines entered 
for the group total. In the same way the groups 
are averaged to get the total running time of the 
shop, and the lines to indicate this are drawn at 
the top of the sheet. 

In this chart the foreman has a graphic record 
of the running of his machines, which enables him 
to visualize his problem and to grasp the facts 
and the tendencies much more firmly than he could 
from any written record or from watching the 
machines. Moreover, the chart emphasizes, 
above everything else, the reasons for the idleness 
of machines, and those reasons indicate very 
clearly who is responsible for the idleness. It is 
at this point that the foreman translates the chart 
into action. He eliminates as much as possible of 
the idleness for which he or his subordinates are 
responsible. If machines have been "waiting for 
set-up," he plans the work of his set-up men more 



112 The Foreman and His Job 

carefully, and, if necessary, trains an additional 
set-up man. If machines are "idle for repairs," 
he does all he can to push the completion of the 
repairs. 

A considerable part of the idleness of machines 
appears to be due to causes over which the fore- 
man has no control, so he takes the matter up 
with his immediate superior, who may possibly 
be the superintendent. He shows the charts to 
him and asks for his assistance in avoiding further 
idleness. If machines are down for "lack of 
help," the superintendent gets better cooperation 
from the Employment Department or raises the 
wages offered. If idleness is due to "lack of 
tools," the superintendent takes the matter up 
with the foreman of the tool room. 

If the trouble is "lack of orders," he takes it 
up with the Sales Department. In each case the 
reason for the idleness is made clear and the mat- 
ter taken up with the one who caused it. In any 
event, the only way for the foreman to be sure 
that his machines will be run any certain day is 
to assign work to them not later than the after- 
noon of the day before. This he does on an 
Order of Work sheet as described in Chapter 2. 



Getting Things Done on Time 113 

Key to Machine Record Chart (Gantt). — The 
following key explains the lines and letters on 
the Machine Record Chart, Figure 4, facing this 
page: 

Width of daily space represents 
working hours of the plant. 

Time machine was running. 

^ mmmm mmmm __. Weekly total of individual ma- 
chine. 

■______■____■ Weekly total of group of machines. 

___■__■■__■ Weekly total of all machines in 
department. 

The portion of the daily space through which 
no line is drawn represents the time the machine 
was idle. Reasons for idleness are indicated as 
follows : 

E. Waiting for set-up. P. Lack of power. 

H. Lack of help. R. Repairs. 

M. Lack of material. T. Lack of tools. 

O. Lack of orders. V. Holiday. 

Where there is more than one reason for idle- 
ness, the reason entered on the chart is determined 
by asking questions in the following order : 

R. Is the machine ready to run? 

O. Is there an order for the machine? 

M. Is the material ready to be worked on? 

T. Are there tools ? 

P. Is there power to run the machine? 

H. Is there an operator for the machine? 

Not all of the foregoing reasons are entered on Figure 4-. 
They are not necessary on this particular chart. 



114 The Foreman and His Job 

Summary of Machine Record Chart. — In order 
to keep before him the progress of his depart- 
ment as a whole, the foreman prepares a "Sum- 
mary of Machine Record Chart" (Figure 6), on 
which he shows the records, week by week, for six 
months. On this he indicates, by means of heavy 
lines, the per cent of his machine capacity which 
he has used, and, in figures, the total number of 
hours of idleness and how much of it is due to each 
of the various causes. The foreman gives this 
chart to his superintendent, at weekly intervals, as 
a report of the progress he is making in eliminat- 
ing idleness of machines in his department. 

Delay Reports. — In most shops hardly a day 
passes that the foreman does not realize that 
there is work to be done which it is impossible for 
him to do for reasons over which he has no con- 
trol. So he lists these jobs on a Delay Report 
(Figure 5, page 115). On the left side of the 
sheet he lists the order numbers and adds what- 
ever information is necessary as to part names 
and operations. He then writes down the reason 
for the delay and the date on which he expects to 
start each order. This report is made out in 
triplicate — the first copy white, the second yellow 
and the third blue. The foreman sends the white 
and yellow copies to the superintendent as a 
formal request for assistance to overcome ob- 
stacles which it is not within his power to remove ; 
and the superintendent is usually able to remove 
a great many of these obstacles. Opposite each 
item the superintendent indicates the proper ac- 



Getting Things Done on Time 



115 



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116 The Foreman and His Job 

tion and returns the white copy to the foreman, 
keeping the yellow copy. This Delay Report 
saves the superintendent a great deal of time and 
trouble because it brings to his attention the prob- 
lems on which his help is most needed and he 
does not have to go around the shop asking people 
what is wrong and frequently finding out only 
when it is too late. 

In some shops the superintendent thinks that 
when he has sent an order to the shop his respon- 
sibility is practically at an end. It is evident, how- 
ever, that the superintendent, with his greater ex- 
perience and larger authority, can be of most 
service in advancing production by helping the 
foreman overcome the obstacles with which he is 
daily confronted. These obstacles are brought 
to his attention on the Order of Work sheets and 
Delay Reports. 

The Machine Record Chart, the Order of 
Work, and the Delay Report provide the fore- 
man with a means of visualizing, not only what 
his machines are doing, today, but also what they 
should do tomorrow. 

Section II 
Visualizing the Progress of Work 

The Mechanism of Production Records. — In 
the ordinary shop there is great difficulty in mak- 
ing out an Order of Work or a Delay. Report, 
such as has been described. Few shops are or- 
ganized in such a manner as to enable the fore- 



UKUARTMENT DAY FORCE ABCfiCo.. 


PRODUCTIVE MACHINES 


PER CENT OF CAPACITY USED 

lO 20 3D AO BO 60 70 BO so 




DETAILS OF IDLENESS DUE TO 


TOTAL 
HOURS OF 
IDLENESS 


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SET-UP 


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SUMMARY OF MACHINE RECORD 



Figure 6. For explanation see page 114. 



Visualizing the Progress of Work 117 

man or his assistant to do this work readily or 
regularly. The foreman must therefore be pro- 
vided with such a mechanism as will enable him 
through his Order of Work sheets to advise the 
superintendent as to his plans and their accom- 
plishment, and through his Delay Reports to re- 
quest whatever assistance he may need. 

This mechanism consists of Shop Orders, a 
Layout Sheet, Production Cards, Man Record 
Charts, etc. It is a simple and dependable method 
of keeping track of orders and work done. 

What Shop Orders Must Show. — First of all, 
the foreman must have orders from the superin- 
tendent's office telling him what work is to be 
done. It is desirable to have these orders show: 

What is to be done (the details of what and 
how may be shown on blue prints or in 
writing) . 

The number of pieces to be made. 

The material to be used. 

The date the work should be completed. 

If more than one operation is to be performed 
on an order in his department, the foreman will 
write on the order the various operations. If 
they do not come to him in duplicate, he will make 
out a second copy so that he can file one set by 
order number and another set according to the 
machine on which the first operation is to be done. 
When that operation is completed, he checks it 
off and files the order to the machine on which 
the next operation is to be done. From the file 
arranged by machine numbers he gets the in- 



118 The Foreman and His Job 

formation necessary for making out his Order of 
Work and Delay Report. 

On the back of the orders filed by order num- 
bers he enters receipts of material, the number of 
pieces done each day on each operation, and his 
deliveries to the next department. From this file 
he answers questions in regard to the progress 
of work on orders. 

The Layout of Jobs. — In order to make out an 
Order of Work sheet, the foreman goes over his 
file of orders arranged by machine numbers; but 
he finds his planning difficult, because he cannot 
visualize the time required to do the various jobs. 
He therefore writes on the Shop Orders, opposite 
each operation, the time it will require to do the 
work, and finds out when he will receive the ma- 
terial if it is not already on hand. The foreman 
then takes a sheet, ruled by hours, similar to the 
one on which he has drawn the Machine Record 
Chart, and lays out the orders graphically on that 
sheet. Figure 7, page 120, shows a Layout Sheet. 
The key to it is on page 121. 

On the left side of this sheet, he lists the ma- 
chines as he did on the Machine Record Chart. 
Opposite each machine he draws a line extending 
through the time each job will take, with an angle 
indicating the beginning and the end. Above that 
line he writes the order number or whatever is 
necessary to identify the job. When he has laid 
out the orders he has on hand, he can see which 
machine will first run out of work and, when an- 
other order is received from the superintendent's 



Visualizing the Progress of Work 119 

office, he assigns it to that machine. If the super- 
intendent asks him when he will finish any par- 
ticular order, the foreman can tell him with con- 
siderable accuracy by referring to this sheet. 

This graphic layout enables the foreman to 
group his orders and distribute them over his 
machines in a much more intelligent manner than 
by the hit-or-miss method of waiting until a ma- 
chine runs out of work before deciding what its 
next job will be. 

As the work proceeds on the various orders, 
the foreman draws a heavy line on the chart 
through each order to indicate the amount of 
work done. A glance at the Layout Sheet will 
at any time tell him how far he is behind or ahead 
of his schedule. When he falls behind he lays 
out, at the end of the line for that machine, an 
amount of time equal to the delay, so that when 
another order comes in he will know when he can 
reasonably expect to begin it. 

This Layout Sheet will at all times tell the fore- 
man the load on his department and the work 
ahead of any class of machines. When a machine 
breaks down, it makes it easier for him to transfer 
the work from it to other machines without dis- 
turbing the proper sequence of work. 

The value of the Layout Sheet is illustrated by 
an incident taken from a New England shop. The 
superintendent was all out of patience with one of 
his foremen. Delivery of a certain order had been 
promised within two months, but when he had 
asked this foreman just when he could finish his 



120 



The Foreman and His Job 









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Visualizing the Progress of Work 121 

Key to Layout Sheet. — The following key ex- 
plains the characters on the Layout Sheet, Figure 
7, facing this page : 

P Date job is scheduled to start. 

T Date job is scheduled to be com- 

pleted. 

l"~ "1 Total time scheduled for order. 

mmammmmmm Work done. 



3 Time required to make up for past 
delays. 

Figures above lines are order numbers. 

Reasons for stopping work are indicated with 
these letters, as may be necessary: 

H. Lack of help. P. Lack of power. 

M. Lack of material. R. Repairs. 
T. Lack of tools. 

The V (at the top of lines separating Thursday 
from Friday) indicates that the chart was repro- 
duced Thursday night and showed how the work 
stood at that time. 



122 The Foreman and His Job 

part of the work the reply had been, "Ten weeks." 
No amount of argument from the superintendent 
changed the foreman's decision, although he did 
say that if he had two more machines he could 
finish the work in eight weeks. The superintendent 
felt that he was stalling, so he went out into the 
shop once more and urged the foreman to promise 
delivery in less than ten weeks. 

The foreman showed him his Layout Sheets: 
the material was not expected in for three days, 
and, after its reception, it had to go through 
several operations; the first and fourth opera- 
tions were long ones. When the superintendent 
looked over the Layout Sheets and discussed the 
time allowed and the probable delays, he could 
see that the machines on which these two opera- 
tions must be done were loaded to their capacity, 
while the machines for the other operations would 
be idle part of the time. These Layout Sheets 
pointed very clearly to the solution. The super- 
intendent took them to the owner, explained them 
to him, and showed him that he must either tell 
the customer that delivery could not be made in 
less than ten weeks or that two new machines 
must be installed immediately, one for the first 
operation and one for the fourth. 

From that time on the superintendent had ab- 
solute confidence in the promises this foreman 
made. 



Visualizing the Progress of Work 123 

Production Cards. — Before the foreman gets 
his Order of Work and Shop Orders running 
smoothly, he finds difficulty in telling the men 
what orders they are to do next and in finding out 
what work has been done, unless he already has 
Production Cards. These are sometimes called 
"Job Cards," "Time Cards," and various other 
names. He uses these cards to tell his work- 
men what jobs they are to do, and to record the 
work done. A complete Production Card should 
show: 

What work is to be done. 

Who worked. 

When he worked. 

What he did. 

What he was paid for it. 

What machine was used. 

It can readily be seen that these cards form the 
basis of all production and cost records. It is 
important that they be filled out with great ac- 
curacy, and the foreman will find that his records 
will be handled with fewer mistakes if he has a 
production clerk who is thoroughly familiar with 
the machines and orders in the shop, rather than 
a clerk who is merely quick at figures. The addi- 
tions can easily be checked, but it is difficult to 
detect errors in order numbers or machine num- 
bers. 

Man Record Cards. — When the foreman has 
his work pretty well planned and all of his rec- 
ords coming through with fair accuracy, he can 
begin to look into the individual production of 



124 The Foreman and His Job 

his operators. It is difficult to get a very clear 
idea of any man's production by going through 
a large number of Production Cards. Accord- 
ingly the foreman has the records transferred to 
Man Record Cards, one for each workman. A 
form for this card is given in Figure 8, page 125. 
On these cards the work done and the time taken 
are entered, but the time taken is not of very 
much value until it is compared with the time 
which should have been taken. The foreman sees 
the advantage of making an estimate of the time 
a job should take before it is begun. If there 
is in his possession accurate information on these 
points he makes use of it and, if not, he makes 
the best estimate he can, based on his past ex- 
perience, keeping in mind that his estimate is 
what a good man should do on a good machine 
without taking into consideration individual 
ability. 

This estimated time is written on the Man 
Record Card, and, when the workman fails to live 
up to the promised estimate, the reason is written 
in the last column of the card. 

Man Record Charts. — It is difficult to get a 
comprehensive idea of the information entered on 
the cards or to compare one man with another, so 
the foreman enters these records on a Man Rec- 
ord Chart. Figure 9, facing page 129, shows a 
form for this chart, the key to which is on page 
129. He lists his workmen on the left side of 
the sheet, arranging them in groups under his sub- 
foremen if he has any; if not, he groups them 



Visualizing the Progress of Work 125 















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126 The Foreman and His Job 

according to kinds of machines. On this chart, 
the wide columns, one for each day, represent the 
amount of work that should have been done in a 
day. On the Man Record Card, the foreman 
foots the day's work of the operator and divides 
the time actually taken into the estimated time. 
The resulting percentage represents the compari- 
son between the work actually done and what the 
foreman thought should be done. For instance: 
An operator has taken eight hours to do work 
which the foreman had expected him to do in six 
hours. He therefore divides eight into six which 
gives him 75 per cent. The foreman then draws 
a light line through 75 per cent of the space for 
that day. 

If the operator has taken eight hours to do the 
work which the foreman estimated would take the 
average man twelve hours, he divides eight into 
twelve and finds that the man has done 150 per 
cent of a day's work. He accordingly draws a 
light line all the way across the daily space and 
another line one-half way across. 

If the foreman has not estimated the time any 
job should take, he draws a broken line through 
a space equal to the time actually spent on that 
job. 

The portion of the daily space through which 
no line is drawn shows how much the operator 
has fallen behind what was expected of him. In 
this space he indicates, by means of a letter, the 
reason for falling behind as shown on the Man 
Record Card. For instance : 



Visualizing the Progress of Work 127 

A. Man is absent. 

G. Man is a green operator, etc. 

If there is more than one reason for falling 
behind, the one to be entered on the chart is de- 
termined by asking questions as listed on the key 
to the Man Record Chart given on page 129. 

At the end of the week the foreman draws 
heavy cumulative lines to show the weekly total 
of each operator — the heavy lines always being 
equal to the sum of the light lines. To get the 
group totals he adds the heavy cumulative lines 
in each group and divides by the number of men 
in the group. To get the total of the whole de- 
partment, the heavy cumulative lines of the group 
totals are added, and then divided by the number 
of groups. 

This department total line shows the foreman 
how his department, as a whole, is living up to 
his idea of what it should do. If it is not satis- 
factory, he can glance over the various group 
totals and see which group or sub-foreman has 
fallen behind. Then, by looking over the in- 
dividuals responsible to that sub-foreman, he can 
see in detail the reasons why they could not do the 
full week's work and which individuals are most 
in need of help. This plan will enable him to con- 
centrate his attention on specific difficulties; and, 
on account of his greater authority, he will be 
more successful in removing those difficulties than 
the sub-foremen. 

When the foreman has drawn up these Man 
Record Charts, he is usually surprised to learn 



128 The Foreman and His Job 

that the failure of the operator to do the work 
within the estimated time is more often his own 
fault than that of the workman. He learns how 
much of the time of both machines and operators 
is wasted because of the improper sharpening of 
tools, defects in materials which should have been 
caught by the inspectors, unsatisfactory condition 
of machines, and lack of proper instructions on 
new jobs. He understands, better than ever be- 
fore, why the costs of so many jobs exceed his 
estimates. 

These charts give the foreman such informa- 
tion about individual production as will enable 
him to instruct those men who are most in need 
of help. They give him, also, a fairly accurate 
basis for regulating the wages of his operators in 
accordance with their production. 



PFPARTMFNT MAW PKP.ORD CHART 




A. B.C. & CO. 


SHEET 1. 


NOVEMBER 


HOLIDAY I 


















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TUES ^ 


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THURS. £ 


FRI. 7 


SAT. Q 


MON. JO 


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FR.I 14 


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Figure 9. For explanation see pages 124-129 



Visualizing the Progress of Work 129 

Key to Man Record Chart. —The following key ex- 
plains the characters used in keeping the Man Record 
Chart, Figure 9, facing this page: 

Width of daily space represents amount 
of work that should have been done 
in a day. 

Amount of work actually done in a day. 

Time taken on work on which no esti- 
mate is available. 

Weekly total of operator. Solid line for 
estimated work; broken line for time 
spent on work not estimated. 

Weekly total for group of operators. 

Weekly total for department. 

The portion of the daily space through which no line 
is drawn shows how much the man has fallen behind what 
was expected of him. 

Reasons for falling behind are indicated, whenever 
necessary, as follows: 

A. Absent. M. Material troubles. 

G. Green operator. R. Repairs needed. 

I. Lack of instructions. T. Tool troubles. 
L. Slow operator. V. Holiday. 

Y. Smaller lot than estimate is based on. 

When there is more than one reason for failure to do 
the work in the estimated time, the reason entered on the 
chart is determined by asking questions in the following 
order: 

R. Was the machine in good condition? 

T. Were the tools and fixtures in good condition? 

I. Was the operator given proper instructions and 

sufficient information? 
M. Was trouble experienced with material? 
G. Was the operator too green to do the job? 
L. Was the operator too slow? 
Y. Was the lot smaller than estimate is based on? 



130 



The Foreman and His Job 



Section III 
Making Sure of Adequate Supplies 

Keeping Stock Up to Requirements. — Nearly 
every foreman has to keep, in his department, at 
least a small stock of tools or supplies which he 
uses constantly. (Material for manufacturing 
purposes is usually kept by a separate stock- 
keeper.) The reason why the foreman keeps 
these tools or supplies in his department is to 
have them on hand when they are needed. With 
this end in view the foreman plans to place his 
order for more before he runs out of stock. This 
is a matter which frequently causes a great deal 
of delay and annoyance; but when it is handled 
in a simple and common-sense manner it gives no 
trouble at all. 

The first thing the foreman does is to make 
a list of all the kinds of tools or supplies he intends 
to keep in stock. This list is made up on a card 
or in a book ruled and headed as follows : 



Material 


Order Point 


Quantity to Order 


Items 


Time 


Quantity 


Time 


Quantity 











































It is wise to limit the material to be kept in 
stock to as few items as possible, for the more 
items there are kept in stock the greater will be 



Making Sure of Adequate Supplies 131 

the cost. The foreman realizes that the cost of 
keeping material in stock is made up of: 

A. Interest on money invested. 

B. Waste and spoilage. 

C. Rental and maintenance of space occupied. 

D. Losses due to material getting out of date. 

Having decided on the items which it is neces- 
sary for him to keep in stock and listed them, 
the foreman wants to know when to place his 
orders. 

The Meaning of "Order Point." — By the 
words, "Order Point," which you will note on the 
sample form already given, is meant the point at 
which an order should be placed for an additional 
supply. This point is determined by two things: 

1. The time it will take to get a new supply. 

2. The amount likely to be used during that 
time. 

Suppose that a certain tool has to be kept in 
stock and the foreman knows by experience that 
from the time he places an order for a new supply 
until it is received and on his shelves about two 
weeks must elapse. He finds out how many tools 
of this kind are likely to be used in two weeks. 
Let us say 10. Under "Order Point" on his list, 
he writes "2 weeks" under "Time" and "10" 
under "Quantity," for 10 is the point at which an 
order should be placed so as to allow time for the 
new supply to be received before the old supply 
is used up. 



132 The Foreman and His Job 

Marking Order Points. — Writing down these 
order points on the list will not, of course, pre- 
vent the running out of stock. It is necessary to 
have some way of automatically calling to the 
attention of the man who takes tools out of the 
bin the fact that the order point has been reached. 
The foreman therefore marks the order point on 
the material itself. 

For example : If he has in stock 40 tools of a 
certain kind and the order point is 10, he ties a 
cord around the 10, attaches a red tag and piles 
the remaining 30 on top of the 10. When the 
30 are used up and it is necessary to break open 
the package of 10, marked with the red tag, the 
foreman is automatically notified that he should 
place an order for an additional supply. This 
is the surest way to avoid running out of stock, 
for nothing is left to one's memory. 

Quantity of Supplies to Order. — The foreman 
now has his stock-keeping in such shape that he 
can turn it over to one of his assistants. The only 
thing he needs to add to his list is the quantity 
to order. He decides just how often he wants 
to order and, from that, he figures the amount he 
will use in that time. In the case of the tool men- 
tioned in the preceding paragraph, where the time 
of the order point was two weeks and the quantity 
10, he may think it advisable to order enough to 
last eight weeks. If 10 have lasted two weeks, it 
will take 40 to last eight weeks. Accordingly, he 
writes "8 weeks" and "40" on the list under 
"Quantity to Order." 



Making Sure of Adequate Supplies 133 

This is the simplest possible method of stock- 
keeping. If the order points written on the list 
are correct, if they are carefully marked on the 
material itself with red tags, if orders are placed 
for more as soon as the order points are broken 
open, the foreman will always have tools and sup- 
plies when they are needed, and will not be forced 
to stop work for lack of tools or supplies. If he 
is careful in deciding on his order points and 
quantities to order, he will be able to keep his 
investment in tools and supplies down to a low 
figure. 

The Value of Production Records. — The mech- 
anism described above enables the foreman to turn 
out the orders he receives from the superin- 
tendent's office in the sequence desired and to re- 
port work as it is done. He also has charts show- 
ing him how well he succeeds in keeping his ma- 
chines running and how the amount of work done 
by his operators compares with the standard 
which he has set. These charts show the foreman 
at a glance a comparison between what has been 
done and what should have been done. They indi- 
cate with great accuracy the probabilities of fu- 
ture performance and enable him to anticipate his 
needs and prepare for them. 

u The broad application of this method of show- 
ing the relation between what has been done and 
what should be done will immediately suggest it- 
self." It has been used in small shops and in the 
biggest industries spread all over the country. 
Where machines are not used, the foreman plans 



134 The Foreman and His Job 

his work for gangs of men or individual men and 
his Order of Work and Layout sheets are arranged 
accordingly. If the reasons for these methods and 
their operation are thoroughly understood, an in- 
telligent foreman will be able to adapt them to any 
kind of work. 

These methods form a complete mechanism, 
not for getting things done, but for furnishing the 
information needed by the foreman in order to 
get things done. 

Records cannot do anything of themselves ; 
it is only the action of the foreman based 
on those records that accomplishes results. 



Part II: The Foreman 

THE FOREMAN AND LABOR 

Section I 
The Foreman and the Man 

Effects of Environment on the Individual. — In 
Chapter 2 we spoke about the worker as a man 
and as an operator, and the things about the 
man which enter into the quality of his work and 
the capacity of his operating skill. It was neces- 
sary there to show the difference between men as 
workers and the difference in their attitudes to- 
ward their work. In this chapter we want to con- 
sider the worker as a man in his thoughts and 
desires and opinions, because the worker brings 
to his work, not only those habits of mind and 
body which affect the quality and skill of his work, 
but he also brings with him his ideas about his 
family, his neighbors, his politics, his religion, his 
tastes, and everything else. 

While these things are not directly connected 
with his working capacity, they are so closely tied 
up with his relations to other workers, his atti- 
tude toward the company, and his contentment, 
that they affect his capacity to work or to re- 
main at work. In other words, these things are 
a part of his contentment with his work or his 
desire to move from job to job. They are a part 
of his way of looking at his work and they make 
him put his heart into his job or keep him from 



136 The Foreman and His Job 

putting his whole spirit into it. The man we 
were talking about as a worker is the machinery of 
the man — his mind and bodily skill. The man 
we are now considering as an individual includes 
the whole man — the spirit within him as well as 
the physical machinery which the spirit uses. 

We say that a man frequently gets into work 
which does not fit him. As far as muscle is con- 
cerned, he may have enough for the purpose; as 
far as skill is concerned, he may do as well as the 
average. What do we mean then? We mean 
that the man cannot put his whole self into the 
accomplishment of the job, and therefore he is 
not in suitable work. 

Just as some men are tall and others short, some 
dark and others fair-haired, some cheery and 
others serious, so some men are sensitive to praise 
and can work better when they receive encourage- 
ment, while others are keen to sense an injustice — 
are almost morbid about injustice — and will see 
something wrong even where it is not intended. 
Some men can stand a lot of grilling and work 
well under it; other men wilt and become dis- 
couraged. Some men like honors better than 
money, and others are the reverse. They all re- 
quire different methods of treatment. 

Ways of Handling Men. — I know one man 
who is accounted cold-blooded and reserved even 
by his best friends. I have seen him so shaken 
with emotion that he had a hard matter to con- 
trol himself. The effort alone forced all the blood 
from his face. He admitted to me — perhaps be- 



The Foreman and the Man 137 

cause he knew I had seen it — that he had to as- 
sume that attitude of reserve to keep control over 
his emotions. Many a man has failed to get the 
best out of my friend because he did not under- 
stand that peculiarity in his make-up as an in- 
dividual. 

There are many people whose pride is as simple 
and great as the pride of the child who has se- 
cured a good mark or won a prize in school, and 
there are others whose pride is of the variety 
which knows only the magnificence of its own 
capacity — like a peacock. The first can be handled 
and educated; the last must be tolerated — it is 
almost impossible to cure it. 

One time 1 had to handle a gang of toughs on 
a shovel job, who took kindness for weakness, 
and I was obliged to thrash the leader before we 
could be friends. I had a hard time doing it, too. 
During the war, one of my friends had been put 
in charge of a gang of Chinese laborers from 
Shanghai — wharf rats, with no moral instincts, 
the poorest specimens of humanity. He was con- 
gratulated for having the best-disciplined gang 
in that section, but he informed me that he had 
three fights before he managed to whip his gang 
into shape. 

On the other hand, I once saw an old army 
sergeant, who had been used to drilling recruits 
from the coal mines, try to handle a bunch of 
rookies from a college. He had to quit. He 
tried to browbeat and bully those fellows and 
they wouldn't stand for it. A mild-mannered, 



138 The Foreman and His Job 

little, bespectacled lieutenant came along and soon 
had those men so they would go through fire and 
water for him any day before breakfast. 

Men as individuals vary in all their spiritual 
reactions and the man who makes his living by 
handling other men must know them as indi- 
viduals. In fact, most of the business leaders 
today are beginning to require their supervisors 
to have more exact knowledge of people; and 
they are using more care in dealing with men than 
they take about any other part of the business. 
Because Jim can be handled in one way is no 
reason why you should try that way on Joe. As 
a matter of fact, you know that both can't be 
handled alike. The more the individual is studied, 
the more effectively he can be supervised with less 
work on the part of the supervisor. 

Working with the Individual. — In most large 
groups it is true that there are some men who 
cannot be kept within the reasonable limits of 
efficiency and order without the fear of discipli- 
nary measures. Usually, however, men will re- 
spond much more readily to a decent square deal, 
sympathy, and some commendation of their work 
from the foreman. They will give their energy, 
their skill, and their loyalty to such a man. Not 
only that, but they will improve themselves and 
give him the value of that improvement. 

The great object of the supervisor is to draw 
out the skill of the worker, to develop his intel- 
lectual capacity for the purpose of improving his 
skill; and to do this with a minimum of turnover, 



The Foreman and the Man 139 

a minimum of friction, and a maximum of en- 
thusiasm. This shows itself in the practical effect 
upon the amount of work which the men turn out, 
the way in which they stay on the job, and the way 
they talk about the job. 

On one tunnel job which involved a lot of rock- 
boring, we had a gang of drillers who could drill 
and shoot faster than any other gang on the job. 
The foreman of this gang was a remarkably skill- 
ful rock man himself, although he was very quiet 
and scarcely ever resorted to browbeating the men 
as most of the foremen were accustomed to do on 
that kind of work. Rock drillers on tunnel work 
are a rough, hard lot, and it is not easy for 
them to work together as a group. This fellow, 
in his quiet way, without any bluster, had so 
thoroughly imbued each of the workers in his gang 
with belief in himself and his ability that they 
swung through their work like a big league ball 
team. Of course, he always had bits sharpened in 
sufficient quantities to keep his men well supplied. 
Water was at hand in plenty. Dynamite and 
fuses were placed so that no time need be lost. 
He could get the tool men to work on the drills 
between shifts in order to keep his gang up to 
the minute, and it used to be a pleasure to watch 
those boys make the pace for the whole camp, 
day after day, without the usual jealousy and 
scrapping. 



140 The Foreman and His Job 

Section II 
The Foreman and the Conditions 

Old vs. New Attitudes toward Environment. 
It's a pretty hard job to go to work while on a 
vacation and paint a house situated close to a 
fine ocean front; especially if you haven't had the 
opportunity of sitting on the beach very often. 
The desire to do something else than to work at a 
painting job is very apt to strengthen greatly un- 
der such circumstances. And, too, it is not easy 
for a man to get up in the morning by gas or 
electric light and travel in the dark to his work; 
and he doesn't feel entirely like working when 
the journey is completed. Nobody feels quite as 
full of energy on a gray day, with cold clouds 
all over the sky, as on a day when the sun shines 
and the sky is bright. All people feel their sur- 
roundings to some degree, and their personal 
efficiency is affected by the feelings occasioned by 
the environment. 

When the factory system first started we did 
not know these things ; we didn't see why it should 
make any difference whether the factory was dusty 
and dull or white and shining. We did not think 
of such things as cleaning windows or making 
enough space to provide all the light necessary 
for the workers. We did not think much about 
the effect of good-looking buildings, comfortable 
floors, dry washrooms, warm dressing rooms, 
sufficient fresh air, and adequate lighting. In so 
many lines of industry the older factories show 



The Foreman and the Conditions 141 

these shortcomings by small windows, dark-coated 
inside halls, poor floors, lack of any real plan of 
ventilation, and other deficiencies. 

New factories are not affected in this way. 
Doctors and engineers have proved that men must 
have fresh air, plenty of light, a warm atmos- 
phere, with clean, dry, and comfortable surround- 
ings if they are to do their work properly with 
the least possible errors. So the newer factories 
are built of glass with a framework of brick or 
concrete. They provide the best known means of 
ventilation. They can be kept clean easily and 
they are comfortable working places. Even in a 
few lines where sunshine and warm air are not 
possible, the hardships of the surroundings are 
mitigated as much as possible. 

There are many older factories which cannot 
be altered to meet modern standards. The build- 
ings cannot be torn down and rebuilt without too 
great interference with production, and so it is 
necessary to use them, with all their defects, until 
they become old enough to require rebuilding. 

There is no excuse in any plant for dirty win- 
dows and dirty inside walls. Walls, whether old 
or new, can be painted so that they are washable 
and they can be kept clean. They can be arranged 
to catch and reflect the maximum of light and thus 
aid the men at work instead of hindering them. 
Artificial lighting, too, can be arranged to give 
the operator the maximum light and minimum dis- 
comfort. The simple sanitary conveniences and 
other requirements for personal comfort can be 



142 The Foreman and His Job 

arranged in any factory building. No concern 
priding itself on shrewd foresight would go with- 
out these things, because it has been understood 
for a long time that light and fresh air, heat and 
dry comfort are necessary to the maintenance of a 
decent working place. Moreover, they affect pro- 
duction and labor turnover immediately and 
vitally. 

There are other matters connected with the 
surroundings which have not been visioned quite 
as clearly, but which affect the work just as much 
as those mentioned. It is not long since we sup- 
posed that dust and smoke in the ordinary foundry 
were necessary to the foundry business and could 
not be done away with. Some concerns, however, 
have built foundries which have just as much ven- 
tilation, light, and heat as any other shop and are 
just as comfortable to work in. 

It took us a long time to learn how to manu- 
facture chemicals so that the workers could be 
comfortable and healthy. The engineers are con- 
stantly studying these things and they are aided 
by the doctors, so that every day we are acquiring 
more knowledge of how to arrange comfortable 
working conditions. Whether the surroundings 
are good or bad, they affect the work of every man 
who must labor in them. If the surroundings 
continue to be bad, the efficiency is reduced and 
labor turnover is increased. While the main con- 
ditions as to light and heat and air are taken care 
of by the engineers, the foreman should see to it 
that these things are looked after, and that the 



The Foreman and the Conditions 143 

surroundings of the individual in his group are 
best suited for his work and comfort. 

Production Affected by Environment. — When 
the factory system began, about one hundred 
years ago in Great Britain, the values of proper 
lighting, plenty of air, proper heat, dry floors, and 
pleasant factory grounds were not known at all. 
The earlier factory workers in those days had 
very little ventilation or light and no heat. They 
frequently worked under conditions sure to pro- 
mote disease and reduce the quality and quantity 
of work. It was not until much later that the 
effect of surroundings upon the man's capacity to 
produce and upon his state of mind toward his 
work was appreciated. 

My memory recalls very distinctly the dye- 
house of a factory I worked in as a youngster. It 
was always dark enough in there to require a lot of 
artificial light and many extra trips were required 
to bring dyed samples to one of the far windows 
to be examined. The floor of the place did not 
drain as it should and there was always water 
on it. The workmen had to stand on boards by 
the dye vats and the centrifugal machines so as 
to be out of the worst of it. Ventilation was bad 
and the steam did not have a chance to escape. 
Working in there was not only disagreeable; it 
produced, in time, hatred for the job. I dreaded 
going into the place, in the wintertime, to endure 
the dampness, the absence of daylight, and the 
smell of the dye. I began to suspect the manage- 



144 The Foreman and His Job 

ment for allowing such conditions and became bit- 
ter toward the factory and the job itself. 

As a contrast, I went through a modern dye- 
house not long ago. There was plenty of light, 
heat, and ventilation — a cheerful, comfortable 
place to work. Floors were arranged to drain 
rapidly and with no discomfort to the worker. It 
looked as though everything had been thought out 
with the worker's necessities and comfort in mind 
and I suppose it had. The engineers who de- 
signed that plant and the men who built it studied 
the whole thing in each detail with the object of 
making it as nearly ideal as it could be for a work- 
ing place. Lighting was arranged according to 
plans which were worked out with such necessities 
in mind; fresh air and ventilation were secured un- 
der most difficult circumstances ; and a comfortable 
degree of heat was provided. This is not because 
people are any more considerate than they were, 
but it is because we have studied the matter much 
more carefully. The work of the illuminating, 
the heating, and the sanitary engineer has been 
of untold value to all industry. These experts 
have patiently worked out methods by which it 
has become easy to provide such surroundings 
as will increase the efficiency of the work and 
minister to the comfort of the worker. 

It is not necessary to be an illuminating engi- 
neer to know that the lights are not as they should 
be for each individual worker in your group, and 
you can tell when the heat is not working as it 
should. To the man who is working in your 



The Foreman and the Organization 145 

group, you are (he representative of the whole 
management; and the promptness with which you 
appeal to the proper departments when the sur- 
roundings are not all they should be will do a 
great deal to keep the men in a good frame of 
mind toward the organization. 

Men react upon each other when they must 
work together. Two men who naturally repulse 
each other, working side by side, will have a very 
bad effect on the work of each. Some men are 
more sensitive to noise than others and some are 
more sensitive to bad air. Sometimes it is pos- 
sible to take these things into account when the 
work is arranged. Of course, the condition of 
the machinery or tools with which the men work 
might be considered at this point, but such matters 
require attention at the proper place in the course. 
The important thing to understand now is the 
effect of the surroundings upon the worker's effici- 
ency and upon his attitude toward industry, the 
management, and the whole social organization. 

Section III 
The Foreman and the Organization 

Group Organization in Industry. — Modern or- 
ganization consists of large groups of men en- 
gaged in some common object and with some 
common background of necessity and ideal, 
divided into smaller groups and again into smaller 
groups so that the operations can be arranged 
properly without confusion. 



146 The Foreman and His Job 

The political as well as the industrial organi- 
zations are built up along these lines. The 
United States is a large group living under a 
definite constitution which gives a common idea 
of government and a common method of conduct- 
ing the affairs of the country. Within this group 
are smaller groups called states, governed in some 
matters by the United States government and in 
other matters exercising their own government 
of the groups within the boundaries of their con- 
trol. Within each state are the still smaller 
groups called counties which in turn govern their 
internal affairs but are bound by the laws of the 
state on all other matters. These counties contain 
cities, towns, and villages, each handling matters 
pertaining to itself alone. Finally, we have the 
family — the oldest and simplest group in the 
political unit. Industrially, matters are worked 
out in much the same way, with the industry as 
the largest unit and the group under the individual 
foreman as the smallest. 

How the Group Evolved. — Suppose we take 
one of the old cabinet-making shops with ten 
workers as an example. There was only one boss 
and he was the owner or master cabinet-maker. 
He worked along with the men, governed their 
work, and took care of all matters belonging to 
the group. He could see what each worker did, 
could know each one's skill and capacity, could 
measure the value of each man and tell who was 
at fault in every controversy, because he was 
right on the job with them. Suppose this owner 



The Foreman and the Organization 147 

put in some machinery so that he could turn out 
the products faster. This gave him enough com- 
petitive advantage so that he bought four other 
shops and employed fifteen workers in each shop. 
Naturally he could not be boss of all five shops 
and act as the foreman in each. He had to en- 
gage five foremen, each to run one shop. Then, 
of course, he wanted each shop to turn out the 
same kind of work, so he had the designs made 
for them instead of having the men make them as 
had been done when he possessed one shop. That 
meant hiring one or two men to make designs 
and get them ready for each shop, so he had to 
add a department for this with its boss. Then 
he had to tell the foreman in each shop what 
jobs to work on, and he had to keep track of 
the wood consigned to each shop as well as the 
tools in each shop, so he had to get a man or two 
to keep records of all this, and one of them had to 
boss that job. 

The proprietor did not now have time to work 
at the bench himself because he had to buy a lot 
more materials and tools, sell more product, 
and look after a number of different shops 
and departments. This made it difficult for him 
to keep in touch with each man who worked for 
him as he had always tried to do. Some of the 
new bosses in the different shops did not under- 
stand men as well as he did and they could not 
keep the men both happy and at work. Some of 
the men did not see why they should work for a 
boss who did not know how to work as they did, 
and they thought he was making a great deal of 



148 The Foreman and His Job 

money out of their efforts, while he himself did 
not seem to be doing anything. They had never 
talked like that in the old days when the owner 
worked in the shop, for he had always shown 
them that he knew how the job should be done and 
could do it for them if they were stumped. 

This is what actually happened until the evolu- 
tion of group organization spread throughout the 
industrial world. Each development added new 
departments and new bosses, so that the number 
of different supervisors kept on increasing and 
the necessity for system kept on growing in order 
that the groups might be subdivided sufficiently 
to keep at work without getting into confusion 
and falling over each other. That's why it is so 
hard to see the necessity for so many rules and 
records and methods of operating. The groups 
are so big, they are subdivided into so many spe- 
cial departments and shops, and they are occupied 
with so many fragments of the work which is 
necessary to the complete job, that it takes a lot 
of study and a lot of observation to see the reason 
for all of it. 

Keeping the Group in Order. — When that old 
chap had been running his five cabinet-making 
shops for some little time, he heard that one of 
his old employes was grumbling about having to 
write his order for wood and kicking at all the 
new notions his boss was getting into his head, 
now that he had become so big and wealthy. The 
man who owned the shops went over to see the 
grumbler and talked with him as he had done 



The Foreman and the Organization 149 

many a time when he had a bench in the corner 
of the same shop and used to tell the men to go to 
the pile and pick out the lumber. Finally, he 
suggested to the disgruntled worker that he come 
around with him and look at each of the depart- 
ments and see what it did and why. 

First, he took him over to the yard where the 
lumber was piled up. Mahogany, oak, birch, 
pine, and the other woods were there, in all the 
different sizes required. Then they went into 
the little office in the lumber yard and the owner 
inquired about some lumber which had been 
taken from one pile, asking where it had gone. 
The clerk then got out his books and the boss 
showed his grumbling old worker where they re- 
corded the lumber brought in and the lumber 
sent out. He showed how each shop had the 
lumber sent to it charged on the books of the 
lumber yard. Then he told how such lumber 
would make so many chairs and tables, so many 
cabinets, and so forth. Next, he explained how 
each shop was expected to show how many pieces 
were made out of the lumber sent to it, how much 
had been spoiled, and other facts. 

Before he got through, the grumbler was be- 
wildered with the many things which had to be 
watched, and "allowed" that he would rather go 
back to the shop than have to look after all that. 

Keeping the group in order means that every- 
body in the group, from the laborer who cleans 
up the yard to the president of the company, 
must have his own work laid out so that every 



150 The Foreman and His Job 

man is doing his part of the work and not doing 
something useless and confusing to the system. 
Every man's work must be understood so that 
the whole plan may be kept ahead of the 
requirements. 

Every Man Must Know His Job. — Everyone 
in an industrial organization must have his job 
thoroughly understood if the organization is to 
go along smoothly and without any confusion. 
Not only is it necessary for everyone to hold 
his job and understand it, but all these jobs must 
be laid out so that the work will go forward from 
first to last without a hitch and without a lot of 
people waiting for other people to decide what 
they are going to do. 

If the job is to make one hundred automobiles 
in a day, then all the parts, material, and work 
must be in the exact proportion for the one hun- 
dred cars. One hundred frames are needed, but 
about three hundred thousand bolts and nuts will 
be used. One hundred carbureters are enough, 
but it will take many more piston rings. 

Perhaps some gf the parts need more care and 
better workmanship; then more time must be 
allowed for the work in order to permit the 
men to put it through in the required quantity. 
This orderly progress must be recorded so that 
the time, the tools, and the men required for each 
part of the work can be recorded and every item 
of expense determined. The cost of each part 
must be known and the cost of each operation 
determined. In that way only is it possible to 



The Foreman and the Product 151 

ascertain the total cost of the completed auto- 
mobile. 

The human side of the matter lies in the proper 
definition of each man's work and the accurate 
recording of its results. It means the arrange- 
ment of the workers so that every job will pro- 
duce just the quantity and quality required to 
complete the whole machine — an automobile ready 
to be sold to the customer at a profit to the 
company. 



Section IV 
The Foreman and the Product 

Intelligent Thought Precedes Intelligent Labor. 
We must always bear in mind the fact that the 
intelligence of man preceded the making of useful 
material; and that nothing ever became useful un- 
til intelligent thought had been put upon the 
possibilities of its use and intelligent labor had 
been given to making it useful. 

For everything we use as materials in our work, 
we are indebted to thousands of other men who 
have worked through past centuries in the effort 
to improve these materials so that they might be 
useful to us. 

We are apt to forget that all these raw ma- 
terials — gold, silver, copper, iron, wool, cotton — 
were of no use to us until man applied his think- 
ing powers and his observation to determining 
what they might be used for and then found ways 



152 The Foreman and His Job 

to prepare them for use. When we use any of 
these materials in our work, we are the direct 
inheritors of the patient study and labor of all 
the thoughtful workers who have gone before 
and, by their thought and skill, have left us a 
richer knowledge and larger means for enjoying 
the materials which they discovered as well as the 
original methods of making them useful. If this 
is true of the materials, it is true just as well of 
the tools with which these materials are turned 
into useful products. 

The discovery of the plane and the saw must 
have required years and years of patient thought 
and study before they lessened the work of our 
forefathers, by a great deal, in producing the 
necessary things for their comfort. It is even use- 
less to speculate how long it took for the human 
race to learn how to comb and spin the fleece of 
sheep and to make cloth out of it which could be 
worn instead of raw skins with the fleece still on 
them. 

We have thousands of different tools today, 
magnificent in their size and almost unbelievable 
in their capacity, which became possible because 
some man or men thought out how these tools 
might be made and then put in the study and 
labor necessary to make them according to their 
previous thoughts. 

We h a ve all of us smiled a little at the inventor 
who spent all his money and years of his life in 
attempting to make a new machine or a new tool; 
but we have benefited by that study in the things 






The Foreman and the Product 153 

which we make today and in the conveniences 
of life which they produce. Every tool that we 
use is a part of the inheritance that came to us 
from other men, and it is itself a visible re- 
minder of the obligation we owe to other men to 
pass on the kind of inheritance which we have 
received. The tools with which we work repre- 
sent the service rendered to us in time, thought, 
and skill by other men, and the product which we 
turn out represents our discharge of an obligation 
to be serviceable to other men. 

What Is Production? — Production is the art of 
taking the material and fabricating it with the 
tools which are available to us so that it will 
become useful to us and to somebody else. The 
material is what we get from other workers, and 
our job is to alter it or combine it with similar or 
different materials by the use of hands and tools in 
order that it may be serviceable. It is necessary 
for us to arrange the tools so that we can get the 
maximum of quality and quantity in executing 
the service and, in turn, we expect that those who 
hand us the material and who supply the tools 
will produce their maximum in quality and 
quantity. 

The three elements of our service are the ma- 
terial which we receive, the tools with which we 
work, and the arrangement by which we take care 
of the operations we are to perform as a group 
of workers. The efficiency of the work depends 
upon the delivery of the material in the quantity 
and of the kind required for the work, and 



154 The Foreman and His Job 

the keeping of the tools in such condition that 
they will perform the work with the accuracy and 
speed required, so that the work can be done with 
the least confusion and with the simplest possible 
movement in connection with its handling. 

In a general way, these matters are arranged 
in accordance with the purpose of the job and the 
part which it plays in the production of the whole 
factory or shop. But the details of this arrange- 
ment in connection with the group with which you 
are concerned will require close study on your part 
because they have so much bearing upon the work 
which is accomplished. 

Everything in the surroundings of the work 
reacts upon the quality and the quantity of the 
work which the individual worker can turn out. 
The material which has cost the energy, labor, 
and study of other men should not be carelessly 
used and spoiled because of the attitude of the 
individual who works with it. No man likes to 
do work unless it is useful and is so accepted. 
The man who has spent his time and labor and 
thought in producing the materials which you use 
has put the other workers who will use that ma- 
terial under an obligation to give it as good ser- 
vice as they have obtained from him. 

When the material is not delivered to the 
worker in the quantity and of the kind required, 
this lack of care induces a carelessness on the part 
of the worker who must use the material. Where 
the tools are not arranged to give the most con- 
venient service with the greatest efficiency, it is not 



The Foreman and the Product 155 

long before the worker's idea of efficiency is af- 
fected adversely. 

All the things which are a part of the job of 
the individual worker of your group have required 
the service of other men in their production, and 
they must be used with care and efficiency if your 
own workers are to fulfil their part in the total 
service. 

The Purpose of Labor. — The purpose of the 
material, the tools, the arrangement, and the 
labor of the worker is the article which this 
combination produces. The object is to provide 
some useful product which will be of service to 
humanity. The thing which is being produced 
in the factory or in the shop, or which is being 
produced in the warehouse or on the railroad in 
the form of service, has gone through the very 
same process which we described in the preceding 
paragraphs. 

Nobody ever made anything without first think- 
ing about how it might be made, and then trying 
to produce the thing which had been created in 
his mind. Every so often, a lot of men, who are 
engaged in producing shovels, or cloth, or some- 
thing else, talk about the theorist who draws blue 
prints or who suggests what might be done, and 
then argue with each other as to which part of 
the work is the most valuable. Originally, it was 
all done by one man. He thought out what he 
might make with the wood or the iron or what- 
ever materials he was using, then he planned how 



156 The Foreman and His Job 

he might make it, and endeavored to produce what 
was in his mind. 

The purpose of labor and production is 
to add value to raw materials by changing 
their form, quality, or location so that they 
may the better satisfy the needs of man. 

All of the Processes Are Necessary. — Theory 
is that part of the w r ork which is concerned with 
what may be done and how it may be done. Prac- 
tice is that part of the work which is concerned 
with bringing into being what theory has planned. 

It is not probable that the old hand worker, 
who was a theorist and practician combined, suc- 
ceeded in producing the thing as he had it in his 
mind the first time. He produced something, saw 
where it was wrong, thought a little more, found 
out how he could improve it and produced some- 
thing else a little better. So, in modern practice, 
the designer studies out what might be done to 
make a useful product more useful and puts that 
down on paper so that the thing itself can be 
made from the pictures of it. He takes the ma- 
terials which he can get and the tools with which 
the work can be done and decides how the article 
should be made, and then the practical men take 
hold of it and see if they can do it. 

When the thing is completed it is not as good 
as they hoped for. It needs changing here and 
there ; sometimes it could be made to do the work 
better if new materials could be used; sometimes 
it could be done better if new tools could be made. 
Therefore, the man who is thinking about how 



The Foreman and the Product 157 

these things might be made more useful is always 
trying to get better materials and better tools 
for the purpose. 

Every time a new design is made, it is good in 
some respects and in other respects it is not so 
good. Observations are then made for the pur- 
pose of perfecting the design. This means that 
the designer must be acquainted with the material 
and the tools and the purpose of the product; and 
all the men engaged in producing it should be 
acquainted with the same things in addition to 
the design. It is obvious that the designer of 
cloth has an entirely different set of conditions to 
meet from, say, the designer of a crane, and that 
no matter how much thought the crane man puts 
upon designing cloth he could not produce valu- 
able results, nor could the cloth designer produce 
a crane. 

The object of each is to think out the best ways 
in which the material can be handled by the tools 
to produce, with the least difficulty, a useful article. 
All the things which enter into the product are, 
after all, primarily the result of man's intelligent 
thought and only secondarily the result of his 
physical skill. 

Thought Must Be Put into the Work. — It 
makes no difference what work the man is en- 
gaged in, the quality and quantity of his work 
will depend a good deal upon his thought about 
the matter; and no work will be done as well as 
it might be done if intelligence is not used in con- 
nection with it. There are four items in connec- 



158 The Foreman and His Job 

tion with the product which indicate its com- 
parative value among products of the same kind 
and which relate to each other so closely that 
they cannot be considered separately. These are 
the design, the structure, the quality, and the pur- 
pose of the product. It is to fulfil these four 
elements in their proper relation to each other 
that all the work of industry is going on. 

The gang of laborers who are cutting down an 
embankment in order to provide more railroad 
tracks are given that job because the railroads 
must move more products from the place where 
they are made to the place where they are to be 
used. The railroad is designed to provide the 
maximum service in this respect. It is constructed 
in order to give this maximum service with the 
least confusion, and its quality is directly reflected 
in the character of the service which it can render. 

The railroad is designed to move the largest 
amount of goods and the largest number of people 
with the greatest speed and safety. The whole 
structure of the railroads is put together with this 
in mind. The whole organization has been ar- 
ranged in order to provide the best quality of this 
service with the largest capacity for it. The pur- 
pose for which the railroad is intended thus gov- 
erns the character of its design, the size and kind 
of construction, and the quality of the service. 

From time to time, the improvements in these 
designs, in the structures, and in the organization 
are not sufficiently rapid to take care of the de- 
mands for service. The whole problem of indus- 



The Foreman and the Product 159 

try is concerned with thinking out and arranging 
improvements in the plan, in the structure, and in 
the quality of the product so that it may serve its 
purpose better and therefore bring more con- 
venience and comfort to everybody. 

We Are Dependent on Each Other. — The 
clothes that you buy at the store, the furniture 
that you need in the house, and all the other items 
that mean comfort and convenience in your life 
have been made by other men for your use, and 
the value of their service is in exact proportion 
to the usefulness of these things. In turn, they 
are dependent upon you for some of their con- 
veniences and necessaries, and your service is an 
essential part of the machinery of service for the 
manufacture of products which are useful. All 
this work must go on at the same time — yours, 
mine, and the work of thousands of other men 
who are engaged in designing, constructing, or 
distributing products anywhere in the world. 

The value of this depends not so much upon 
your work or my work, but upon all of us working 
together. And it is because modern industry has 
made it possible for us to work together in this 
service that we are able to enjoy conveniences 
which no other century has provided. 



160 The Foreman and His Job 

Questions for You to Answer 

1. What is the lesson to be learned from the 
story of Foreman Skinner? 

2. What are the two chief responsibilities of the 
foreman? 

3. What is the value of the Daily Idle Machine 
Report? 

4. What values are to be obtained from keeping 
a Machine Record Chart? 

5. What purpose is served by making Delay Re- 
ports? 

6. How does a Layout Sheet help in getting the 
work done? 

7. What should a Production or Job Card show 
and why should they be absolutely accurate? 

8. What does the Man Record Chart show? 

9. What is the value of production records? 

10. How does environment affect the individual? 

11. How far is the foreman responsible for bad 
working conditions ? 

12. Why is group organization necessary in mod- 
ern industry? 

13. What would you say as to the necessity of sys- 
tem in group organization? 

14. What is the purpose of industrial labor? 

15. To what extent are all the processes in a plant 
dependent on each other? 



Chapter 4 



Part I 
DEPARTMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS 



Part II 

THE FOREMAN 
AND THE SOCIAL ORDER 



Part I : The Job 

DEPARTMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS 

Section I 
Service Organized for the Foreman 

Service and Democracy. — The days of autoc- 
racy in industry are numbered. It is becoming 
more difficult each day to get adequate produc- 
tion in a shop where all the power is in the 
hands of one man. There is an irresistible move- 
ment in American industry toward a more equal 
distribution of this authority and responsibility. 
As responsibility is shared by a greater number 
of men, it becomes more necessary for them to 
cooperate. If a plant is to be successful, the 
various parts of it must be well administered and 
each must render the necessary service to the 
other parts. 

The new type of foreman appreciates this fact 
and knows that the best foreman is the one who 
renders the best service — who gives most help to 
all those with whom he comes in contact, because 
it is only in that way that he can permanently suc- 
ceed in getting work done. 

Democracy, in the mind of the modern foreman, 
means equality of opportunity. Industry is reach- 
ing out for a greater degree of democracy and 
the foreman can do his share — and it is a large 
share — by giving fair play and equality of oppor- 
tunity to those under his control. The success of 



164 The Foreman and His Job 

this more democratic industry depends largely on 
the help the foreman gives to the workman, the 
other foremen, the superintendent, the owner of 
the business, and the public. 

Giving service is not an easy task. It takes a 
great deal more brain-power, energy, and self- 
control than it does to exact service from other 
people — that only takes lung power and muscle; 
but the new type of foreman has that brain-power, 
energy, and self-control, and, more than that, an 
unselfish attitude that makes him enjoy giving 
more than getting. 

On the other hand, all departments of the plant 
must serve the foreman, else he cannot fully 
utilize the methods outlined in this course and get 
the work done on time and at lowest cost. While 
the foreman is rendering service to the other de- 
partments, he expects and must receive hearty and 
ungrudging cooperation from his associate super- 
visors and from all others holding managerial 
positions. In no other way can democracy in in- 
dustry be attained; and in no other way is it possi- 
ble to utilize equipment, machinery, and men to 
best possible advantage. 

All Departments Help the Foreman. — In a 
large plant there are a number of service depart- 
ments which are organized to help the foreman. 
It is obviously impossible for a foreman to do his 
real job of getting work done by bringing to- 
gether the workman, the material, the machine, 
and the process, if he has to design his own tools, 
jigs, and fixtures, interview all applicants for em- 



Service Organized for the Foreman 165 

ployment, or keep his own stock of materials. In 
the well-organized plant these things are done for 
the foreman in order to leave him free to get 
things done. 

The wise superintendent tries to make the best 
use of the facilities of these auxiliary depart- 
ments, for he realizes that better results can be 
obtained by placing in charge of such departments 
men who are specially fitted for that work. A 
good buyer, in charge of a department which pur- 
chases materials and supplies for the whole plant, 
can undoubtedly secure better prices and deliveries 
than if the buying were done by a dozen different 
foremen. A man in charge of repairs throughout 
the plant is able to devote his entire time and 
thought to the maintenance of equipment and can 
get better results than the foremen, to whom the 
matter is only a side issue. 

Repair Department Service. — In order to se- 
cure service from the Repair Department, the 
foreman tells the head of that department what 
he wants done and when, with whatever other in- 
formation may be of value to the repairman. This 
information is written by the foreman or his clerk 
on a "Repair Order," of which there are three 
copies, white, yellow, and blue. A form for this 
order is given on pages 168 and 169. On this 
order he shows : 

Number of machine to be repaired. 
Name of operator. 

Whether the machine is partly or totally dis- 
abled. 



166 The Foreman and His Job 

What parts are broken or worn. 

What caused the breakdown. 

What work was in machine at the time (in 
order to indicate the relative importance of 
the repair). 

Date by which repairs should be completed. 

Date on which machine will be available for 
repairs (the time between these two dates 
should be as great as possible). 

The foreman sends the white and yellow copies 
of this order to the Repair Department and places 
the blue copy in a file marked "Repairs Pending," 
in his own department. 

It is the duty of the head of a Repair Depart- 
ment: 

To get repairs done as quickly and as well as 
possible. 

To record the cost of keeping individual ma- 
chines in repair. 

The head of this department handles his repair 
orders in the same way as the foreman of a pro- 
ductive department handles his shop orders, ex- 
cept that, instead of filing them by machine num- 
bers, he files his orders by the individual work- 
men or gangs of workmen who are to do the 
work. He arranges his Order of Work sheet in 
the same way, showing what work each man or 
each gang is to do the following day. His Delay 
Report lists the repair orders he knows should be 
done the following day but which he will, for 
some reason, be unable to do. His Man Record 
Charts are the same as those used in a productive 



Service Organized for the Foreman 167 

department, although each job must be estimated 
separately since so few of them are repeated. 

On the backs of the yellow and white copies of 
his repair orders, the head of the Repair Depart- 
ment writes: 

Operations done. 
Workman who did them. 
Hours spent on each operation. 

Either in his own department or in the Cost 
Department the man's rate is entered, his wages 
extended, and the cost of material with the over- 
head expense added in order to get the total cost 
of that repair job. 

When the work has been completed, the Repair 
Department sends the white copy of the order 
back to the department in which it originated, and 
the yellow copy is placed on file either in the 
Repair Department or the Cost Department. 
The foreman of the originating department 
destroys the blue copy, which has been filed under 
"Repairs Pending," and places the white copy in 
a permanent file by machine number. From this 
file he can at any time tell the cost of repairs to a 
certain machine over any period of time. He also 
has, in his department, records of the cost of idle- 
ness of that machine due to repairs. When he 
adds the cost of repairs to the cost of idleness due 
to those repairs, he gets a figure which he can 
compare with the cost of a new machine. With 
this information in hand it is not difficult to decide 
whether or not an old machine should be sold or 
scrapped. 



168 



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170 The Foreman and His Job 

Tool Room Service. — If tools, jigs, and fixtures 
are made in a separate department or tool room, 
the head of that department must know what is 
wanted and when. This information usually 
comes from the Superintendent's Office in the 
form of a shop order, possibly with a blue print 
and detailed specifications made up by the Engi- 
neering Department. These orders sometimes 
originate with the foreman. A productive depart- 
ment orders direct from the tool room those tools 
which are regularly kept in stock and also sends 
through orders for the sharpening of tools. 

The head of the tool room handles his orders 
for tools in the same way that the foreman in a 
productive department handles his shop orders. 
The Order of Work sheets, Delay Reports, and 
Man Record Charts are identical and his costs 
are arrived at in the same manner. 

Service from the Superintendent's Office. — It is 
the duty of the Superintendent's Office (it may 
be known as the Manufacturing Department or 
the Planning Department) to tell the foreman 
what work is to be done and when. This is done 
on Shop Orders, as outlined in a previous chapter, 
with the date of beginning shown for each opera- 
tion so that there will not be any doubt as to 
precedence of work. The Superintendent's Office 
sends the necessary orders for tools to the tool 
room and for materials to the storeroom, with 
definite instructions as to when they should be 
ready. Copies of these orders are given to the 
foreman of the department in which the work is 



Service Organized for the Foreman 171 

to be done so that he can call for the tools and 
materials when he is ready to use them. 

The Superintendent's Office checks the Order 
of Work sheets received from the foremen to see 
that the orders are being done in the sequence 
desired according to the latest information. 

The Superintendent's Office helps the various 
foremen avoid the delays which they list on their 
Delay Reports. This office also records the 
progress of work in order to see that its plans 
are followed. 

Storeroom Service. — It is the duty of the Store- 
keeping Department to have material ready when 
it is needed. The Superintendent's Office, when it 
issues orders to a productive department, advises 
the storekeeper what material will be needed and 
when, so that it can be reserved and delivered to 
the foreman when he calls for it. 

The methods used by the storekeeper in han- 
dling his material are the same as those outlined 
in Chapter III for the foreman to follow in keep- 
ing his own stock of tools and supplies. In a large 
storeroom, however, it is necessary to keep a set 
of balance cards on which receipts and issues are 
entered. These card records are checked up with 
the amounts in the storeroom whenever the order 
point is reached or the supply is exhausted, in 
order to help the storekeeper avoid running out of 
stock. These balance cards also tell him at any 
time the amount he has in stock without an actual 
count being necessary. 



172 The Foreman and His Job 

Inspection Department Service. — How stand- 
ards of quality are agreed upon by the Sales De- 
partment, the Engineering Department, and the 
superintendent was outlined in a previous 
chapter. If there is a chief inspector, it is his 
duty to see that these standards of quality are 
lived up to. If there is no chief inspector, this 
duty falls upon the foreman; but he should not, 
in any case, have to determine the inspection 
standards. It is the foreman's duty, however, to 
tell the inspectors what work they are to do first 
if they have more than they can complete in a 
day. A copy of his Order of Work sheet will tell 
the inspectors the proper sequence of work. 

If inspection is done in an entirely separate de- 
partment, the chief inspector is given a copy of 
the Shop Order on which inspection is shown as 
one of the operations. He handles his Shop 
Orders just as any foreman would, also his Order 
of Work Sheets and his Delay Reports. 

As was pointed out in a previous chapter, the 
closer the inspector is to the machine the more 
effective will be the results of his work. If he is 
capable, not only of picking out the flaws in a 
piece of work, but also of knowing the reason for 
the error and teaching the operator how to avoid 
that error in future, he will have a much more 
constructive influence on the shop. 

Engineering Service. — If the foreman is asked 
to work out the processes of manufacture, a great 
deal of his time will be taken away from the actual 
running of his department, and it is for this reason 



Service Organized for the Foreman 173 

that such work is usually done by specially trained 
men in an Engineering Department. In many 
plants this work is carried further and, after the 
best method is worked out, it is written down to- 
gether with the time each operation should take. 
Such departments have a vast fund of knowledge 
at their disposal which the foreman can use to 
advantage. The actual value of his work de- 
pends entirely on the use that is made of it by the 
foreman. 

Employment Department Service. — In order to 
make use of the service which the Employment 
Department is ready to render, the foreman must 
write out a "Requisition for Help," specifying the 
abilities and qualifications necessary in the desired 
worker. 

When it receives this requisition, the Employ- 
ment Department communicates with its sources 
of supply and selects from the applicants those 
who appear to be best fitted for the work. The 
foreman then has an opportunity to interview 
these men and determine whether or not they are 
capable. However, it is only when a new man 
is tried out on the work that an intelligent estimate 
of his ability can be arrived at. Whenever ad- 
visable, the foreman will, after securing the 
superintendent's approval, send to the Employ- 
ment Department a "request for transfer of em- 
ploye" or a "request for change of rate." If an 
employe leaves, the foreman makes out a "notifi- 
cation of leaving," which he sends to the super- 
intendent and to the Employment Department for 



174 The Foreman and His Job 

approval, and a "final pay order/' which he sends 
to the Cost Department. The forms mentioned 
in this paragraph will be given in Book IV. 

Welfare work is usually looked after by the 
head of the Employment Department or some one 
delegated to do that work. It is a service which 
is of great value to the foreman. If one of his 
men is taken sick or injured, the hospital gives him 
expert care. If lunches are served and baseball 
diamonds and handball courts provided, his em- 
ployes are kept in better condition physically and 
mentally and they can do better work. 

Purchasing Department Service. — A requisition 
for the purchase of equipment may originate with 
the foreman, the Engineering Department, or the 
Superintendent's Office. A requisition for ma- 
terial originates usually in the Superintendent's 
Office or the storeroom, although in some cases it 
may originate with the foreman. 

These requisitions must show : 

What is wanted, with full specifica- 
tions as to quality or grade. 

Purpose for which the material is 
to be used, so that it may be 
charged to the proper account. 

Quantity wanted. 

Date when required. 

It is the duty of the Purchasing Department to 
obtain quotations from supply houses for all ma- 
terials, supplies, and equipment. After consider- 
ing the prices, quality, and deliveries, the Pur- 



Service to Associates 175 

chasing Department decides from which firm to 
buy and makes out a purchase order. It is the 
duty of the Purchasing Department to follow that 
order up until delivery is secured. 



Section II 

Service by the Foreman for His 
Associates 

Service to the Workman. — A good foreman 
makes it his business to remove all the obstacles 
which stand in the way of his men in order to 
leave them free to do their jobs — the things which 
they are paid to do. The workman who thinks, 
knows that he can not continue indefinitely to get 
paid for a good day's work when he does only 
half a day's work, and he resents the continued re- 
currence of difficulties which will not enable him 
to do a full day's work. 

The foreman who removes these obstacles re- 
leases the energy of the workman and allows him 
to make use of his creative power. America is 
the greatest of industrial nations and, to a greater 
extent than in any other country, our pursuits of 
happiness should be through work, for if a man 
does not find happiness in his work he must change 
his attitude toward it or else find the right job. 
The foreman who is most successful in removing 
the obstacles which prevent the full exercise of a 
workman's ability is rendering a real service to 
that man. 



176 The Foreman and His Job 

« 

The foreman helps this man when he sees that 
his machine is in condition to turn out good work 
and when he plans the movement of materials 
through the shop so that the man will not have to 
stop his work and hunt for material. 

The foreman helps the workman when he issues 
the necessary orders for tools and follows up his 
orders so that he can get the tools to the work- 
man before he is ready to use them; and when he 
keeps the necessary supplies on hand, a lack of 
which would compel the man to quit work. 

The foreman helps the workman when he gives 
him the necessary instructions as to what he is to 
do, when he is to do it, and how; also, when he 
takes pains to see that these instructions are under- 
stood. This training which the foreman gives 
the workman is possibly the greatest service he 
renders. He finds out what kind of work a man 
is best fitted to do and gives him the necessary 
training to enable him to do that work well. He 
makes good workmen out of poor workmen. 
When they learn to do even one job well, they 
get a different outlook on life. Men who for 
years have considered themselves "wage slaves" 
gain confidence in themselves and a control over 
themselves which makes free men of them. They 
show possibilities which were entirely unsuspected 
until they mastered their jobs. 

Protection of the Workman. — The foreman 
renders service to the workman when he provides 
the best guards and safety devices and good work- 
ing conditions. He looks at the shop from the 



Service to Associates 111 

point of view of the workman and attempts to 
give him as safe and healthy working conditions 
as he would maintain in his own home. There is 
no more reason why he should allow a machine to 
be unprotected and thereby run the risk of catch- 
ing a man's sleeve and crushing his arm, than to 
leave a stairway unprotected at home and endan- 
ger the lives of his family. In his own home he 
would not think of eating or sleeping in an unsani- 
tary basement, and in his shop he is equally careful 
not to allow his men to work under unhealthful 
conditions. He provides as much light as possible 
by keeping the windows clean; and he places near- 
est the windows those who have the closest work 
to do. When there is not sufficient daylight, he 
provides good general illumination and places ad- 
justable lights over the machines. 

The foreman arranges for sufficient heaters to 
keep the department warm enough in winter to 
enable his men to do their best work, and provides 
whatever ventilators are needed to keep the air 
fresh and protect the men from drafts. He does 
not need to be told that the losses due to the slow 
work of men in cold or badly ventilated shops are 
infinitely greater than the cost of heat and pure 
fresh air. 

The foreman keeps his washrooms and lockers 
scrupulously clean and does not allow material of 
any kind to accumulate on the floor of his depart- 
ment. The fact that he keeps the shop as a whole 
in an orderly condition has a direct influence on 



178 The Foreman and His Job 

the way his workmen keep their tools and ma- 
chines. 

For those of his men who sit down the foreman 
provides stools or chairs which are substantial and 
are carefully adjusted to the height of the bench 
or machine. It is very shortsighted to allow a 
man to tire himself out, month after month, when 
a chair, if conditions permit, would considerably 
reduce his fatigue. 

Providing safe and satisfactory working con- 
ditions is a real service to the workman, but the 
foreman also knows that such service results in 
increased profits for the owner of the business. 
Workmen also know that this is a fact, so the 
foreman takes care never even to hint that he is 
doing the men a favor by keeping the shop clean 
and safe. 

A Buffer for the Management. — It is the fore- 
man who interprets the management to the work- 
men. If he is dictatorial, he will nullify all the 
broad-minded policies of the management. If 
the foreman bases his decisions on impressions or 
influence, there is little use for the management to 
attempt to better its treatment of workmen. 

On the other hand, if the management is in- 
clined to be autocratic, the foreman can get at 
least a certain measure of democracy into the 
management of his own department, which will 
slowly but surely influence the policy of the firm. 
He can show how much better results can be 
secured from a department run by democratic 



Service to Associates 179 

methods than by the old-fashioned method where 
"the king can do no wrong." 

Divided Responsibilities. — In assigning clear- 
cut jobs to his subordinates and avoiding divided 
responsibilities, the foreman helps his men for he 
makes it easier for them to make good. A fore- 
man came into his department one morning and 
found two of his subordinates in a heated argu- 
ment. One of them had fired a boy the night 
before and the other insisted that he had no right 
to fire him. The boy had been working for both 
of them and the previous night he had made a mis- 
take. When called to task, he had talked so im- 
pudently that the man he had been working for 
at that particular time fired him. The boy came 
back next morning to get his pay envelope only to 
find that half of him was fired and half was not. 

Of course the foreman had a good laugh at 
the situation, but at the same time he realized how 
impossible it was for a boy to make good under 
such circumstances and he took the time to go 
over the rest of his organization and see that there 
were no more divided responsibilities. 

Increased Capacity and Rewards. — The fore- 
man helps the workman when he bases his wages 
on the amount of work done, for he gives him an 
incentive to increase his capacity for work. When 
he promotes the best producers to more difficult 
work which pays better, he adds the stimulus of 
promotion to the increase in wages. Although 
this is helping the workman, it is of course only 



180 The Foreman and His Job 

plain justice to reward him according to the ser- 
vice he renders. 

Your records of production and the basing of 
wages and promotion on those records gradually 
eliminate special privilege of all kinds in the 
shop. If a man who is in a position of authority 
continually fails to do what is expected of him 
and the record of his work is open to those around 
him, he cannot continue to hold that position of 
authority. He will usually appreciate that fact 
in time to save himself and do the work as it 
should be done. 

By this method of keeping individual records 
of production and of systematically attempting to 
remove the obstacles which stand in the way of 
complete accomplishment, a remarkable degree of 
cooperation is secured and possibilities developed 
in the workman which would otherwise have been 
impossible. His initiative and ambition are stimu- 
lated. The foreman gives careful consideration 
to his suggestions for improvements which will 
increase his output, because it is to his interest to 
do so since an increase in output will lengthen 
the foreman's production line as well as the 
operator's. 

The workman sees the man whose line is long- 
est, whose production is greatest, appointed to 
the position of sub-foreman when there is a va- 
cancy. He sees the sub-foreman who is most suc- 
cessful in developing his group of men become a 
foreman. As he watches these changes take place 
throughout the organization and positions of 



Service to the Management 181 

authority given to men who "know what to do and 
how to do it," he sees opening up before him pos- 
sibilities of advancement limited only by his 
ability and his energy. 

Service to Other Foremen. — A foreman helps 
other foremen by delivering material or parts in 
process to them when he has promised to do so. 
If conditions beyond his control make it impos- 
sible for him to live up to his promises, he tells 
the other foreman the reason and makes him a 
new promise which he can live up to. Nothing 
in the foreman's job is quite so exasperating as 
the chasing up of material which has not come 
through on schedule. 

The foreman who keeps his machines running 
and lives up to his schedules enables other fore- 
men to keep their machines running and to make 
good their promises. 

That foreman is of most help to other foremen 
who is frank and open in all his dealings, prefers 
facts to opinions, is not looking for credit — is, in 
short, the typical, straightforward American fore- 
man. 

Section III 

Service to the Management 
by the Foreman 

Service to the Superintendent. — The foreman 
helps the superintendent when he makes the best 
possible use of the machines in the department of 
which he has charge. He sends copies of his 



182 The Foreman and His Job 

Machine Record Charts to the superintendent so 
that he can see how well his equipment is being 
used and the obstacles which prevent him from 
doing as well as he would like to do. 

The superintendent has an opportunity to talk 
over the charts with the foreman and get at the 
detailed reasons for idleness, if necessary. If 
the trouble is repairs, the superintendent consults 
the foreman of the Repair Department, investi- 
gates weaknesses of machines, and arranges to 
have repairs made more promptly. If idleness of 
machines is caused by lack of help, the head of the 
Employment Department is consulted and, if 
necessary, the wages offered are raised or new 
sources of supply are opened up. In short, the 
superintendent is enabled to get at the causes of 
idleness and to apply the necessary remedies and 
in this he can be more successful than any single 
foreman, because of his greater experience and 
authority. 

The superintendent can also see from the Ma- 
chine Record Charts the effects of his decisions or 
instructions, or, if no effect is apparent, he can find 
out whether or not his instructions have been fol- 
lowed. 

The foreman helps the superintendent by show- 
ing him on the Man Record Charts what his men 
are accomplishing and what prevents them from 
doing more. Here again the superintendent is 
given an opportunity to get at the detailed reasons 
for idleness and to use his broader authority in 
removing obstacles. He can see how well his men 



Service to the Management 183 

are fitted to do the work assigned to them and 
can transfer to other work those who are least 
fitted for their jobs. 

These charts enable the superintendent, not 
only to study the conditions in his shop, but also to 
see very clearly any tendencies toward poor pro- 
duction and to take whatever steps are necessary 
to guide the shop in the way he wants it to go. 

The foreman helps the superintendent when he 
turns out his orders in the proper sequence, when 
he reports what he intends to do and what he has 
done, and when he calls the attention of the super- 
intendent to the things on which he needs help. 
This sorts out for the superintendent the most im- 
portant things for him to do each day and enables 
him to get more done than if he had to walk 
around his shop and ask each foreman what his 
troubles are. Instead of spending his time trying 
to get information, he devotes it to removing 
obstacles. 

The foreman helps the superintendent by show- 
ing him the load on his machines, that is, the 
amount of work ahead. From this layout he can 
tell how long the machines will be busy with the 
orders he already has in hand. This enables the 
superintendent to make accurate plans for the use 
of the plant as a whole and, if necessary, to take 
up new work, to purchase new equipment, or to 
dispose of unused equipment. 

The foreman shows all these facts to his super- 
intendent without fear or favor, with the result 
that the superintendent can keep in closer touch 



184 The Foreman and His Job 






with the shop than he could possibly do from ver 
bal reports alone. The foreman can also secure 
from the superintendent the help he needs with 
little delay. 

Service to the Cost Department. — The foreman 
sends to the Cost Department his production cards 
(they are sometimes called time or job cards) 
showing : 

What work was done. 
Who did it. 

The time taken to do it. 
What was paid for the labor. 
The machine used. 

From these production cards the Cost Department 
makes up its pay roll and secures records of the 
cost of the work done in the shop. 

The Cost Department tabulates these records 
and sends back to the foreman the cost of work 
done compared with previous costs or, if it is 
special work, compared with estimated costs. 
From the foreman's point of view the only reason 
for keeping cost records is to use them in reducing 
future costs. 

Service to the Owner of the Business. — The 
foreman helps the owner or the manager by re- 
ducing the cost of manufacture through the elimi- 
nation of idleness and useless work. This refers 
both to men and machines. By reducing this 
burden of idleness and useless labor, the foreman 
makes it possible for the owner to pay productive 



Service to the Management 185 

workers more liberally and according to the 
amount of work they do. He thus helps to build 
up the reputation of the company by getting work 
done on time, at a reasonable cost, and of standard 
quality. 

The ability of the foreman to train and de- 
velop workmen is one of the greatest assets of 
any company, for the value of an industrial plant 
is measured by its productive capacity — the ability 
of its organization to turn out goods — rather 
than by the inventory value of its land, buildings, 
and equipment. In other words, the value of a 
business is determined by the rate at which it is 
moving and not by the appraised value of bricks 
and mortar. The methods used by the new type 
of foreman focus the attention of the whole plant 
on production and show the progress which is 
being made toward that end. 

The Owner Relies on Reports. — Usually it is 
not necessary for the owner to follow all the de- 
tails of the work being done in the various parts 
of his plant; but he will follow the progress made 
on the principal classes into which the output can 
be divided. If the progress made on one of these 
classes is satisfactory, he will need to pay very 
little attention to it. If, however, another class 
of work is behind schedule, he can call for the 
detailed charts which are in the hands of one of 
his foremen. From these records he can see what 
particular items are being held up and the rea- 
sons. When he locates the cause of the delay, he 
can concentrate his efforts on that particular prob- 



186 The Foreman and His Job 

lem and overcome difficulties which to his sub- 
ordinates are insurmountable. 

These methods make it unnecessary for the 
owner or general manager to go through volumes 
of reports or to go the rounds of his superinten- 
dents and foremen in an attempt to find out what 
work is not progressing satisfactorily. His sub- 
ordinates are likely to minimize the importance 
of delays on some items and not to realize the 
effect a short delay will have on the remainder of 
the work. 

By providing good working conditions and re- 
ducing the fatigue of his workmen, the foreman 
increases their output and directly affects the 
profits of the company. By introducing a greater 
measure of democracy in his own department, he 
places his organization on a firmer basis and 
makes it easier to go through unsettled conditions 
without disturbance to production. 

On the charts kept by the foreman, the owner 
can see the facts in regard to the service rendered 
by the various members of his organization, and 
it is no longer possible for incapable or lazy men 
to occupy positions of authority without the own- 
er's knowledge. 

The Foreman's Reward. — When a foreman 
realizes that the old type of management does 
not render the proper service to the owners of the 
business or to the public, and that it oftens works 
real hardships on the workmen, he determines 
that his shop shall be so well managed that there 
will be fair play for all. He finds that the key 



Service to the Management 187 

to the situation is idleness. His records of men 
and machines show a surprising amount of idle- 
ness, but a study of the reasons makes it possible 
to fix the responsibility and remove the causes. 

In order to keep his machines busy and to en- 
able his men to do a fair day's work, he installs 
simple and effective methods of getting work done. 
These methods lay facts before his workmen and 
himself and greatly improve their relations. 
There is no room for suspicion and no oppor- 
tunity for arbitrary action. Each learns that it is 
to his advantage to help the other. The work- 
man follows the foreman's instructions because 
they enable him to turn out more work and to get 
larger wages. The foreman devotes more atten- 
tion than ever before to the training of his work- 
men. Discontented workmen are cured instead 
of being fired. Workmen are promoted from the 
bench or machine to positions of responsibility 
because they know what to do. 

This foreman has a shop which is "organized 
for work" and, because it does turn out work, he 
gets his financial reward and, even better than 
that, he has the satisfaction of doing a job well 
and of rendering adequate service to all those 
with whom he comes in contact. Instead of being 
a drag on industry, he becomes part of its driving 
force. 

The good foreman knows that he can 
be permanently successful only when he 
secures full justice for the owner and for 
the workmen. 



Part II: The Foreman 

THE FOREMAN 
AND THE SOCIAL ORDER 

Section I 
The Foreman and the Community 

Effects of Industries on the Community. — Com- 
munities are affected by the industries which are 
maintained within their borders and by which the 
communities subsist. Towns even take on their 
physical characteristics from the kind of work 
which is done there and the houses in which the 
work is executed. Workers drift from town to 
town largely because they have no deep interest in 
their social surroundings and do not feel them- 
selves to be a part of their community or particu- 
larly important in its considerations. Many of 
them do not visualize their own responsibility to 
do what they can to make their communities bet- 
ter. Education in the schools, recreation, neigh- 
borhood development, parks, transportation — 
these things are of the utmost importance to the 
worker for he depends upon them, almost wholly, 
for the development of his children, the health 
of his family, and the amusement of himself. He 
should, therefore, take an interest in community 
matters. 

A good part of the wakeful hours of each day 
is spent getting to work, working, and getting 



The Foreman and the Community 189 

home from work. The work which each man does 
colors his thinking, and makes itself felt in all his 
actions, both in the factory and in the community. 

Not long ago, a meeting was called to discuss 
plans for improving a small community near New 
York. One of the men at the meeting was a 
skilled mechanic and a very thoughtful man. He 
talked with his pencil. That is to say, he sketched 
working drawings of the plans he was presenting. 
He had been working so long with blue prints and 
dimensions in his own operations that he thought 
in the same way and it came out in his conversa- 
tion. His occupation influenced his manner of 
talking when he was among his friends in the 
community. 

In industry, we have not paid as much atten- 
tion as we should to the way in which men's occu- 
pations color their thinking and how that think- 
ing, expressed in action, affects the community. 
You should, therefore, understand that your influ- 
ence as foreman of the group which you govern 
is not confined to their work and their attitude 
toward the organization of which you are a part, 
nor particularly to the occupation in which they 
are engaged. The influence which you exert can 
be extended toward aiding the workers to exercise 
their responsibilities as part of the community. 
Thus the community may improve along the lines 
that are most valuable for the workers them- 
selves, the place in which the men work, their 
understanding of the organization with which they 
work, and their understanding of the way in which 



190 The Foreman and His Job 

those organizations affect the community. The 
better understanding in the shop means a better 
understanding in the neighborhood and a better 
understanding in the community itself. 

The influence of the shop radiates into the com- 
munity even more than the influence of the com- 
munity backs up into the shop. It is in direct- 
ing this shop thought that your influence as fore- 
man can be used to the advantage of the com- 
munity. 

From the earliest time, the craftsman has been 
an important factor in the life of his community. 
To make a useful product, or to do a useful ser- 
vice, is about the most important thing in life 
anyway, and the men who do these things have 
always given a certain character to the town or 
the village and finally to the larger political group. 

The Social Conditions of the Town. — The 
town or village is the smallest political unit just as 
your group of workers is the smallest industrial 
unit and the family is the social unit. Formerly 
every man made laws for himself and for his fam- 
ily. There were no laws between families, and 
there were no orders imposed upon the family cir- 
cle from the outside. As people became more in- 
telligent, they saw how foolish it was to spend time 
in fighting with each other, as families, when they 
could spend that time more usefully in making 
things. They found out that they could live to- 
gether under simple laws which would leave them 
free to make things needed by all if they would 
stop fighting and stealing. So they agreed to give 



The Foreman and the Community 191 

up some of their cherished rights by conforming 
to a law that any man who killed another or who 
stole anything should be punished. 

Gradually they discovered that, instead of each 
man acting as his own policeman, it would save 
time and enable them to live more comfortably if 
they hired men to take over the job of policing 
as their regular service. That is how the village 
or the town evolved its laws and regulations, with 
its special men for protection, for health, and for 
the discharge of the functions of government in 
the township. 

Living together in the town peacefully is based 
upon two fundamental responsibilities: 

First, the responsibility of abiding by the laws 
which a man, as a citizen, has agreed to. 

Second, the responsibility of respecting his 
neighbors' rights as scrupulously as he demands 
respect for his own. 

It is because we know how necessary it is for 
these laws to be observed and for these rights to 
be respected that we have an organization operat- 
ing against those who do not obey the laws, and 
who do not respect the rights of their fellow- 
citizens. We know that, unless all but a small 
proportion of the people obey the laws without 
coercion and respect the rights without demand, 
civilization would be impossible and we would 
go back into chaos with consequent destruction. 

The work which a man does is the great edu- 
cational factor in his life, and it was out of the 
necessities of work that the social civilization 



192 The Foreman and His Job 

grew. It is out of industry today that improve- 
ment in social conditions must come, very largely; 
and the foremen in industry, as the top sergeants 
of this great army of workers, can be a very 
valuable force in the improvement of social con- 
ditions through their industrial influence. 

Public Unconcern about Civil Matters. — I was 
asking a friend of mine — an intelligent railroad 
conductor — about the educational system in his 
community, and he was obliged to confess his ig- 
norance of the things which were taught, the 
character of the teachers, or the method of teach- 
ing. He said those things were up to the school 
board. Maybe ; but it is absurd to teach children 
a lot of useless things ; and a teacher with wrong 
views about life or society or industry can make 
a deep impression upon the thinking which will 
be done by the children when they have grown 
older. Parents are the logical persons to take an 
interest in what is taught their children and who 
does the teaching. 

You would not think much of yourself, as a 
foreman, if you had an assistant hired to do part 
of your work and you did not attempt to find out 
whether the work was being done well or ill. Too 
frequently, however, we forget that we, as citi- 
zens, are responsible for the kind of organization 
which there is in our community. We also forget 
that the production part of our community life is, 
after all, the most vital part and the most potent 
in its influence upon the social organization. 



The Foreman and the Public 193 

Service to our neighbors, socially, is just as 
important as service to people industrially. The 
work of building a bigger and better community 
starts in building a bigger and better understand- 
ing in our little group in the shop. If we can 
manage to put a little of the thought which we 
expend upon our work, during working hours, into 
work for the benefit of the community and the 
neighborhood during the rest of the hours, there 
is no reason why the influence exerted by the shop 
on the town should be anything but valuable and 
for the betterment of our life, comfort, and con- 
venience. 



Section II 
The Foreman and the Public 

No Group Is Independent. — In the attempt to 
do all the great work of keeping modern civiliza- 
tion at its required speed, we have become sep- 
arated into groups so far apart from each other 
that we voice our opinion of the other groups as 
though we could live without them, and as though 
they had no usefulness in the scheme of things. 
We give them names that mean very little, and 
we do not seem to appreciate our dependence upon 
each other as groups. 

For years, many manufacturers talked about 
the railroads as though they could give them their 
trade or not as they chose. They did not seem to 
realize that if the railroads could not move goods 



194 The Foreman and His Job 

fast enough the manufacturer would be the first 
to suffer. 

We talk labor and capital as though they are 
separate and distinct, and as though they have no 
intimate dependence on each other. We forget 
that money which you and I have saved and put 
into the bank is loaned on collateral to various 
businesses for operating purposes, and that our 
savings suffer when capital is disturbed. The 
money, which the Bolshevik government gave to 
the Herald in London for propaganda, was sup- 
plied through the smooth working of the banks 
which act as the clearing houses of capital; and 
the very government which was occupied in de- 
stroying the capitalist system was supplying the 
money for its own work by means of that system. 

We do not realize that modern civilization has 
made us all neighbors, and that all are working 
in the same shop. We need each other so badly, 
in order to supply what each can't make for him- 
self, that we are all in the same boat. If I make 
bricks for a living, somebody else makes my hats, 
shoes, and clothes; supplies me with cigars, coal, 
gas, and electricity; provides my transportation 
to and from work, and a hundred other things 
which I must have. I am indebted to other men 
for my reading, my amusement, my recreation, 
and my comforts. If I worked from early morn- 
ing till late at night, I could not make for myself 
more than a very few of these things, and they 
would be clumsy and crude and frequently of lim- 
ited use. To supply any man with the things 



The Foreman and the Public 195 

which equip his home — no matter how modest — it 
is necessary to collect materials from a number of 
countries, and keep thousands of men at work in 
many lines of endeavor. The whole life of mod- 
ern civilization is centered upon producing goods 
or service for people, distributing the products 
and the service, and organizing our operations so 
that this work can be done with least confusion 
and in the shortest space of time. It is because 
we depend upon each other so much and have 
organized this dependence, that we can get our 
work done and still have free time for amuse- 
ment and recreation. 

We Are the Public. — Take any magazine or 
newspaper and read the articles about the public, 
and you would think that the public is some sep- 
arate part of the community which buys all the 
goods and service which the rest of us are making. 
Not so; you and I are the public. We are the 
ones who buy all the stuff we are making. Only, 
instead of buying from myself, I am buying your 
work and you are buying mine. We are the pub- 
lic, buying from each other the products we have 
made; and selling to each other the goods we 
make. So, when we talk about the public we are 
talking about ourselves. Our trade must be on 
a mutually profitable basis or we cannot continue 
to live as we do today. We are the market for 
our goods (speaking of the whole country) and 
unless we work together, with some reasonable 
degree of agreement, we will have to suffer, be- 



196 The Foreman and His Job 

cause we will not make enough things to go 
around. 

We Are All Consumers. — You need the things 
which some other men are making just as much 
as they need what you are making. You want good 
service from the men who are making things for 
you, or rendering you any service, and you do not 
want to pay more than it is worth, any more than 
the other man wants to pay you more than it is 
worth. You want the service he is rendering — in 
fact, it is necessary for you to have it; and he 
needs the service you are rendering — that is just as 
necessary to him. As a worker you have an obli- 
gation of service to the other fellow, and as a 
consumer you have a right to demand that same 
obligation from him. We cannot get more than 
we give in a world where we depend upon each 
other as much as we do in this modern civilization 
of the United States. 

What Does Education Amount To? — There 
are a whole lot of men who think an educator 
should be content to get a small salary, "for," 
they ask, "what does education amount to, any- 
way?" They forget that it is the wide spreading 
of knowledge which has given us this marvelous 
mechanical development with its wonderful con- 
veniences and comforts. They do not see that it 
is this constant attempt to give knowledge to 
thousands of people and teach them how to think 
better which has made it possible for these men 
to study out the improvements that have given 
us the thousands of conveniences, amusements, 



The Foreman and the Public 197 

comforts, and advantages of which our grand- 
fathers knew nothing. 

All men are a part of the public. All men are 
consumers of many things when they are only 
workers at one thing. All men are educators, in- 
fluencing other men for good or bad, and all men 
are citizens of a country and of a state. They are 
residents of a community where they are poli- 
ticians, either good or bad in their attitude or 
influence. So do not be fooled by such terms as 
the public, the consumer, the worker, the educator, 
and so forth, which we are so fond of quoting. 
Do not imagine that these men are not like we 
are and that we have nothing in common with 
them. We are the public, we are the educators 
of all who are working or playing with us, we 
are the workers, and we are also the politicians; 
for the government is ours and it is as good or 
as bad as we make it by our influence and our 
votes. 

See That Your Men Understand. — As a fore- 
man you should see that the men in your group 
have some understanding of these things and your 
service to your fellow-workers will be increased 
many fold by the proper development of their 
ideas in these respects. A general understanding 
of these matters will open the way to industrial 
improvement and social improvement beyond the 
greatest dreams of the most intelligent of workers, 
and will be of more benefit than all the theoretical 
programs put forth by impractical visionaries. 



198 The Foreman and His Job 

Section III 
The Foreman and the Town 

Rise of the Town. — What is the thing we call 
the town, the city, or the village? A good many 
men have studied these aggregations of human 
beings and have written many books with long 
words and much argument to prove that the whole 
system of social organization has grown up for 
this reason or that reason. We are not concerned 
with these weighty matters here, but it is well to 
know a little about how these social groups grew. 
Maybe by that means we may find out our place 
in them and what they mean to us. 

Well, when the old Saxons conquered England 
many hundred years ago, the leader and his wife, 
with their followers, their children and their 
servants' children, their horses, cattle, sheep, and 
so forth, settled on some land, where they built a 
number of rude wooden houses, surrounded the 
whole with a strong fence and called it a town. 
Everybody that belonged to the same outfit lived 
together, fought on the same side, and worked to 
benefit the same crowd. They were in the same 
town. They lived together peaceably, although 
they might fight often with the people of another 
town. The principal occupations, outside of fight- 
ing other towns, were farming, the making of 
clothes — with all the processes that the job im- 
plies — and, in fact, the making of everything that 
was needed, from the weapons and the tools to 
the ornaments for the dwellings. Every year the 



The Foreman and the Town 199 

men of the town met together to decide on the 
rules and regulations which they would agree to 
abide by and to choose such leaders as would best 
serve the interests of all. 

The Town Meetings. — There are some things 
which can be worked out for the people who live 
in the same place and have the same common 
necessities. These matters can best be taken care 
of by the cooperation of all the people living in 
that place. Thus the town becomes a cooperative 
unit. In early days, when the town was gradually 
being organized, one representative of each fam- 
ily — the head of the family — was entitled to his 
say in the affairs of the town and to register his 
opinion about them. That is how the voting in 
town meetings arose. As the towns grew larger, 
the citizen could not leave his work every day to 
attend a town meeting to decide something which 
was important, perhaps, but not so important to 
him as his work. So the citizens decided to elect 
from their number certain men, who would be 
paid to spend enough time on the town matters 
to get them done, one man to be chosen for every 
so many citizens. The men who were chosen in 
this way were expected to take the burden of town 
affairs from the shoulders of the townspeople ; and 
the people decided that each citizen should give, 
according to his possessions, a certain sum to the 
town to provide the money to pay the special rep- 
resentatives who were to get the work done. 

Industry vs. the Town Meeting. — If we were 
to compare the town with an organization in 



200 The Foreman and His Job 

industry, we would say that the little group of 
workers under the foreman, concerned with the 
same piece of work, is to industry the same as the 
family to the social unit. This group is the oldest 
and smallest industrial cooperative unit. The town 
would be represented by the factory which is 
made of many small groups working on a common 
object in the same place with the same heads and 
the same policy. 

Both the town and the factory are the most 
important units in the cooperative effort in mod- 
ern life. They are the places where the coopera- 
tive problems must be worked out first. They 
are the units which must provide a unity of de- 
velopment before the greater cooperation can be- 
come effective; and they are the places where the 
necessary understanding must be worked out. 

What Factory Organizations Mean to the 
Town. — The town will transfer into its social life 
the kind of organization which exists in the fac- 
tories located within its borders. If there is no 
unity in the factory, if there is no attention to the 
proper understanding, there will be little coopera- 
tion in the community and much division in its 
councils. Many are the towns which illustrate 
this. Men are chosen, not because they are capa- 
ble of being most beneficial to the town and its 
necessities, but because they represent the labor 
union, or they are known to be supported by the 
manufacturers, or they are liked by the merchants. 
There is no unity of understanding as to the mu- 
tual obligation which rests upon the citizens to do 



The Foreman and the Town 201 

the work of the town through the choice of the 
right men to run it and administer its affairs. 

The town is divided in its councils because the 
working life is divided and there is no understand- 
ing of the mutual dependence in either case. The 
merchants do not understand how closely their 
welfare is dependent upon the welfare of all the 
citizens, so they feel that some of the representa- 
tives should represent the merchants' interests 
only. The workers have no confidence in the 
management of the factories and think that they 
will want to run the town for their own benefit, 
so they insist on electing, not the best men for 
the town, but the men who will protect the work- 
ers' interests exclusively. The manufacturers feel 
that they are expected to furnish too much of the 
money to run the town without having the chance 
to say anything about how it shall be spent, so 
they try to assure themselves of the friendly in- 
tention of the candidates for the offices. 

Good Industrial Organization Means a Good 
Town. — If the industrial life of the town is run 
on a basis of mutual understanding the town will 
begin to operate along right cooperative lines. 
You see how intimately the life of the town is 
associated with the life of the industries within 
its borders and the kind of men engaged in these 
industries. The community is the same group of 
men who run the industries — the management 
and the workers. These men are no different in 
spirit when they work for or think of the town 
than they are when they are thinking of their 



202 The Foreman and His Job 

work. They are more interested in their work 
and are likely to be more intelligent in that mat- 
ter. That is the only difference. The spirit is 
the same, however, and it will find its expression 
in the character of the town, the divisions in its 
politics, the methods of its operations, and the 
results obtained. 

The Foreman in Local Politics. — Your influ- 
ence is of importance in the improvement of town 
affairs. A new spirit in the town will react upon 
the workers and management in the industries of 
the town and on the merchants. You can improve 
the whole community when the work and spirit of 
the town are improved. The whole life of the 
community is too cooperative for an improvement 
to be effected in one place without this improve- 
ment affecting the rest of the community. 

No man has done his duty when he has merely 
done his work and voted his ticket. His obliga- 
tion for service to other men in industry is no 
greater than his obligation for service to the rest 
of the community. The one must be considered 
with the other, if both are to have their measure 
of improvement in the future as they have had in 
the past. Indeed, they must improve to a greater 
degree if they are to keep pace with the multiply- 
ing requirements of the future population. Just 
as it is the spirit of service, mutually discharged, 
which will improve industry, so it is the spirit of 
mutual service which will help the community. 



The Foreman and the Government 203 

Section IV 
The Foreman and the Government 

What Is the Government? — The government, 
at least that part of it which we term political, is 
divided, like industry, into large and small units 
of operation. It is really the development of the 
orderly life of the people toward the management 
of their common or cooperative affairs. The 
necessity for these cooperative affairs can be illus- 
trated in the making of roads. If a number of 
people living on the same street want that street 
improved, they can get together and agree to an 
assessment of the property to take care of the cost. 
If the community wants to plan out improved 
streets for the whole town, then it is necessary for 
a majority of all the taxpayers to agree to having 
the streets improved. 

Suppose, then, that it is desirable to extend 
these improved roads so that the farmers and 
country people can get in and out more easily; 
it is necessary to have an agreement with the 
farmers, which means that the whole county is 
concerned. Again, there are a number of towns 
in different counties with needs for transportation 
between them. It becomes advisable, then, to pro- 
vide good roads to give this transportation. It is 
necessary to get an agreement between all these 
places, and so it becomes a state matter to be de- 
cided by the voters of the state. 

Government simply means the arrangement of 
the cooperative affairs of a number of people liv- 



204 The Foreman and His Job 

ing in the same town, county, state, or country, so 
that these matters will be taken care of properly 
and for the benefit of all the people concerned. 

The Voice of the Voters. — In this country, the 
government is the collective voice of the voters, 
and the majority agreement is the decision. As 
the population increases and the affairs of co- 
operation — laws, regulations, construction of new 
conveniences, information, and all the other oper- 
ations of common requirements — grow in volume 
and complexity, it is utterly impossible for the 
citizen to give his individual time to these matters. 
It would be impossible for the average citizen to 
arrange all governmental affairs in an orderly way 
even if he could devote the time necessary for such 
matters. Men are, therefore, elected by the voters, 
or appointed by the representatives of the voters, 
to conduct the operations of the government, to 
see that the citizens are protected, that laws are 
obeyed, and that the government services are 
properly rendered. 

Government Is Business. — Government is 
nothing more nor less than the public business 
which you and I need to maintain our orderly and 
peaceful relations. Just as industry is govern- 
ment — the government of production and distribu- 
tion; so government is business — the business of 
orderly social cooperation. Government is ar- 
ranged as it is in order that we may do our work 
with less trouble and with more convenience, com- 
fort, and recreation. Unless we understand this 
and use our votes and our citizen rights to see 



The Foreman and the Government 205 

that government is carried on effectively, we can- 
not go ahead with industry as we should in order 
to enjoy a fuller life. 

We have mentioned the fact that you cannot 
expect to get service from other workers unless 
you give service. We cannot expect to secure our 
rights as citizens and keep them secure unless we 
fulfil our obligations as citizens. Our industrial 
progress and our governmental improvement are 
bound up in each other so intimately that each man 
must fulfil his service to each of them in order to 
secure his rights from both. 

The Government Is What We Make It. — Very 
often the way we talk about the government would 
indicate that we think it is something entirely sep- 
arate and distinct from our own work, our own 
life, and our own responsibilities. Just as we 
forget that we ourselves are the public — both pro- 
ducers and consumers of goods — so we entirely 
lose sight of the fact that we are the government 
and that we have only delegated the work of man- 
agement to those we elect. The responsibility for 
good government still rests upon us as citizens, 
and the progress governmentally will be just the 
kind of progress we permit. 

Rights vs. Obligations. — In the Preamble of 
the Declaration of Independence there is a refer- 
ence to the inalienable rights of the individual. 
That means those rights of the individual which 
cannot be delegated to anyone else and which 
cannot be taken away from him by delegation of 
any kind. Of course, this does not mean that 



206 The Foreman and His Job 

some of us have those rights and some of us do 
not. If we are all created equal and have equal 
opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness, then it is obvious that we must recog- 
nize the rights of the other fellow to the same 
things that we demand for ourselves. The fact 
that sidewalks are public property and that I am 
entitled to walk upon them does not entitle me to 
jostle somebody else off the sidewalk because I 
do not feel like stepping aside. 

It is a pity that we are always insisting so much 
on the rights which we have and the obligations 
which other people owe to us, and we pay so 
little attention to the rights which they have and 
the obligations which we must admit toward 
them. It is only because we recognize these rights 
and obligations in connection with all the ordinary 
laws, that we can live together in a peaceable so- 
ciety without much destruction. No police power 
could be used which would be big enough to 
oblige us to obey these laws, if we were not al- 
ready convinced that they are necessary. 

Government Is Service. — The basis of govern- 
ment is just the same as the basis of industrial 
cooperation. It is necessary for each worker to 
recognize his obligation for service to the other 
workers, and his right to demand service from 
them. In social life, it is necessary for us to 
recognize our obligation to observe the laws, to 
live peaceably with our neighbors, to take our part 
in government decisions, and to fulfil the rest of 
our obligations as citizens; just as it is our right 



The Foreman and the Government 207 

to demand the same consideration from the other 
citizens. If we attempt to get laws which will 
benefit ourselves only and which work a hardship 
upon others, we are taking advantage and at- 
tempting to secure something which it is not our 
right to demand. It makes no difference whether 
this be advantage in taxation or tariff; or whether 
it be advantage in fire, health, or road regulation; 
or laws relating to hours of labor and conditions 
of work. None of these is within our rights unless 
it benefits the whole community or is calculated 
to remove any injustice under which we labor. 

Cooperation Implies Discipline. — Cooperation 
means also discipline in the working out of all 
orderly government. A democratic government 
differs from an autocratic government mostly in 
the fact that the democratic government expects 
each citizen to discipline himself into recognition 
of the rights of the other fellow, the necessity of 
obedience to the law, and the discharge of all his 
citizenship obligations. The autocratic govern- 
ment disciplines its subjects in its own way with- 
out their consent or desire. It does not expect 
them to discharge any citizenship duties because 
of their personal discipline, but because it orders 
them to perform their duties. 

The democratic government depends for its suc- 
cess upon the way in which each citizen is willing 
to discipline himself in the discharge of his re- 
sponsibility toward the general body, and this is 
the only basis on which it can progress toward 
unity of purpose. 



208 The Foreman and His Job 

Questions for You to Answer 

1. What is "Democracy" in industry? 

2. What data should go on a Repair Order? 

3. How shall the foreman get cooperation from 
the tool room? 

4. What kind of help should the Superintend- 
ent's Office give to the foreman? 

5. How far should the foreman go in using the 
knowledge of the Engineering and other 
technical departments? 

6. Name some specific forms of service which 
the foreman should render to his workmen. 

7. What are the results to be expected when 
responsibilities are divided? 

8. How can the foreman best serve the super- 
intendent? 

9. What should the owners of the business ex- 
pect from the foreman? 

10. What influence can the foreman exert on the 
community ? 

11. How intimate is the relationship between the 
industries in a town and its government? 

12. What is your relation to state and national 
government ? 

13. What is just government? 

14. What is the difference between i 'rights" and 
"obligations"? 

15. What is necessary to get cooperation? 



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